Jeff, in theory you're correct, but in practise I believe you're wrong, and the principal reason is due to the poor design of the whole transport - interface - DAC setup.
I agree with you that the 1s and 0s get to the DAC with no problem, but the issue is the DAC clock.
For high quality audio the DAC master clock should have very low jitter. Unfortunately the traditional method, where the CD transport has the master clock, and then the DAC has to try to reassemble the clock from an SPDIF or AES EBU data stream is a very poor scheme, and is entirely responsible for the fiasco of multi kilobuck transports and digital cables.
If DAC had been designed with low jitter master clocks, and the transport was slaved to the DAC I think we could have been using $20 CD rom drives, and ZIP cord digital cables right from the start. Many companies have implemented proprietary mathods to allow their transports to be slaved to their DACs, but it has never really caught on.
It would appear to me that Dan Lavry's approach of using a RAM buffer and a low jitter oscillator in the DAC is the best engineering approach to solve the bad situation. With enough RAM it wouldn't matter whether data were to come in from a PC (via USB, or ethernet) or from a transport (via toslink, SPDIF, or AES EBU).
I've never heard his DACs, they also may be compromised in the implementation, I don't know, but I've found the whitepapers on his website extremely informative.
There are several papers about 1/3 way down this weblink.
http://www.lavryengineering.com/supportpage.html
I agree with you that the 1s and 0s get to the DAC with no problem, but the issue is the DAC clock.
For high quality audio the DAC master clock should have very low jitter. Unfortunately the traditional method, where the CD transport has the master clock, and then the DAC has to try to reassemble the clock from an SPDIF or AES EBU data stream is a very poor scheme, and is entirely responsible for the fiasco of multi kilobuck transports and digital cables.
If DAC had been designed with low jitter master clocks, and the transport was slaved to the DAC I think we could have been using $20 CD rom drives, and ZIP cord digital cables right from the start. Many companies have implemented proprietary mathods to allow their transports to be slaved to their DACs, but it has never really caught on.
It would appear to me that Dan Lavry's approach of using a RAM buffer and a low jitter oscillator in the DAC is the best engineering approach to solve the bad situation. With enough RAM it wouldn't matter whether data were to come in from a PC (via USB, or ethernet) or from a transport (via toslink, SPDIF, or AES EBU).
I've never heard his DACs, they also may be compromised in the implementation, I don't know, but I've found the whitepapers on his website extremely informative.
There are several papers about 1/3 way down this weblink.
http://www.lavryengineering.com/supportpage.html