What are you using as a streamer? Constructive feedback please.

@danager, In a perfect world yes but in reality that’s not true. The voltages that are represented by ones and zeros have residual values that distorts the signal.

And what effect exactly does that have? How much distortion? Does that effect USB, Ethernet and SPDIF/I2S, or only one or two of them?

There’s a lot to discuss here, electrical noise from jitter and reflections in connectors and cables.
@danager I also use Fidelizer Pro, in conjunction with Audio Optimizer (Audio Phil) and JPlay Femto. This reduces significantly the work done through the CPU by turning off (non essential to playback) threads while I’m running Win Sever 2012 R2 in core mode.

Most DACs don’t have a checksum when they have a bit stream from a device feeding them data. What they can decipher is what is converted as best it can into the analog signal that was digitized into the file being played. This digital encoded information, represented in a series of 0 and 1 or boolean of high and low etc. still needs to be electrically transferred to the receiving DAC, which will interpret the encoded values and create an alternating current output to be amplified by the next device in the system.

Some will discuss the merits of galvanic isolation, because there is some logical benefits when for example optical was introduced. However some measures and engineering practices will allow USB, HDMI and Ethernet to do an even better job these days.

The greatest defeater of electrical noise is reducing noise in the DC circuits of the entire system. A winning way to accomplish this is with a very well engineered power filter, to clean up the sinusoidal waveform of the incoming AC. Before it even gets converted through say a bridge rectifier and capacitors which are used to convert the AC into a DC power source locally in the devices in the system.

If anyone is using a Windows based system, Fidelizer, Audio Optimizer and Jplay Femto are all great tools to mitigate and remove noise from the computer, and will bring it much closer to dedicated streamers in performance. In fact the greatest difference in quality of streamers in my opinion is the manner in which they have a lower jitter and electrical noise to share with downstream devices (DAC).
And of course, the timing of the bit stream with DACs that have no computer built in to checksum the data.