Well, let’s look at specifics.
How much of its $400 price is devoted to the built-in DAC? This is fairly easy to guesstimate, since the IFi Zen non-streaming DAC sells for $200. So that will work as a rough guess, leaving $200 of the sales price to devote to the streamer.
The streamer section is built around an off the shelf 64-bit quad core ARM Cortex CPU. It runs an open source Linux OS aimed at audio aficionados called Volumio, which is packed with features (able to run Roon, Tidal, run searches through your recordings, multiroom playback, streams over Sonos and Chromecast, suggests new or related artists based on your listening, etc.). Get Started - Volumio
Mini-PCs with this CPU capable of running a full-featured Linux OS like this run in the neighborhood of $135 and up. The mini-PC market is subject to much larger sales, much greater competition, and therefore much lower price markups than the audiophile streamer market. It’s therefore doubtful that iFi has been able to customize the streamer section to any great extent or it would take up considerably more than the $200 of the Zen Stream’s sales price that we’ve been able to estimate by subtracting out the price of the Zen DAC. In other words, the streamer section of the Zen Stream is very probably built much like a $135+ range mini-PC.
In its marketing copy about the CPU, iFi emphasizes its power. This is natural, since it has to run the many Volumio OS features. More power output, more noise.
In my setup, I’m using a mini-PC that starts at $265 and is a little under $200 more than that as I’ve furnished it. Thus the parts cost of the design is very probably somewhere between double and 3 times the parts cost of the Zen’s streamer section. It is running a minimized Linux server OS, which means it doesn’t need to run any graphics, and it is not packed with features I don’t use. Thus, besides having its BIOS optimized for low jitter, the CPU is not called upon to provide a lot of power, and therefore noise is minimized.
The mini-PC is connected to an iFi DAC that retails for 4 times the price of the Zen DAC, so again at a rough guess, parts cost for my DAC is approximately 4 times that of the Zen Stream’s DAC section.
Now obviously the customer for the $400 Zen Stream is likely not going to be the same as the one for a mini-PC and DAC that together cost something more than $1200. And that’s fine - choices are good.
The design engineers sweat the small stuff in my experience, and the results are evident in the performance of the system.
