2. digital
  3. 142897-111267

Does streaming defy the laws of physics?

I understand how a high quality power conditioning system can take the raw lower quality electricity in the residential power utility system delivers to a normal American house which delivers that same low quality electricity to our electric outlets and "purifies" it before it enters our source components and then each component (source, preamp, and amplifier) in turn adds its specific power conditioning to suppot production of beautiful music. 

What i dont understand is the digital equivalent of this delivery transformation.  Starting from my internet service provider over commercial grade wire from my cable company to my house then through whatever quality coax wire my home builder used 25 years ago to my router then the commercial Cat 5 wire in my ethernet LAN to the wall connector where I finally connect to my DAC. Is the digital signal at that wall ethernet outlet bit-perfect with all the subtleties and nuances sent out by the Tidal server I'm connected to or is it like my utility power that needs "a miracle occurs here" purification to restore anything that was lost during the bits long journey to that point?  Is the role of my systems digital Hardware/firmware/software to perform that "miracle" of knowing what got lost in translation?
ezstreams
mzkmxcv
777 posts
 
Jitter (slight timing errors resulting in a raised noise floor, think static or tape hiss) is the only thing that affects digital audio. However, that’s from source device to DAC. From the internet to your computer/phone/etc., data is sent in packets and it buffers, there is 0 jitter in this regard as it’s not technically a truly live signal (due to the buffer), it is no different than playing a song you download or ripped, except you don’t have the full file at once.
erik_squires
16,051 posts
 
Hi ezstreams!

So the Internet only works because digits are transmitted with perfect reliability, or it absolutely breaks. I can't read your post here on Audiogon, I can't save it, and I can't do anything unless this is true.

Now, as for real time playback, like with Netflix or Hulu, or music, real time buffering is key. You've been to a website, and sometimes it's slow, and sometimes it's fast, or sometimes some parts are fast, and others are slow.

So, for video and audio, there has to be some buffering and sometimes resolution trade offs.

So, hidden from you, is a stream that gets data as fast as it can and puts it in a bucket. There's another stream which actually feeds your TV or DAC, which dolls it out at a steady rate.

In general, this is pretty reliable and really good. I mean, when you consider the quality of sound from Bell's first speaker and microphone to today, things are spectacularly better. And 5.1 on a Netflix stream? Forget about it. It's magic.

Next, a lot of tech has gone into high quality DAC's to get that stream as smooth as possible. Over the last 10 years, this part, related to reducing jitter, and high quality clocks, has gotten REALLY good.
nekoaudio's avatar
nekoaudio
489 posts
 
The Internet protocols used for typical consumer audio and video streaming services are bit-perfect, otherwise things break exactly like @erik_squires was saying.

There are some Internet protocols used for streaming that are not bit-perfect, but those tend to be used for things like real-time audio and video where minimum delay is more important than data integrity. These are not used for Netflix or most streaming services.

So don’t worry about all the stuff that’s getting those bits to you from across the planet. The electrical engineers, software developers, and computer scientists who designed that stuff have pretty much guaranteed you’ll get a bit-perfect copy every single time. Using the laws of physics to do so.
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