Ok. I am a software engineer with 15 years of experience. I have built streaming services for my day job in the past. I have pretty deep technical knowledge into how streaming services work.
The idea that you might be losing bits through low quality components is simply not true. When data is transmitted from a server like Spotify’s, or even when data is being transmitted over a cable via USB or Coax, the data is sent in packets. A packet is a bunch of bits. For Spotify, a single packet is 512kb for example. In TCP, receiving device (we call them clients) sends an acknowledgement message back to the sender (we call them hosts) if and only if that packet is not corrupt.
Another poster basically mentioned that you skip the ack for streaming. That’s not true. You skip the ack for live broadcasting like Twitch, but not for streaming like Spotify or YouTube. If you lose a packet, the music just stops and waits for you to get the packet. We would rather stop the playback than just skip 512kb of a song. That would be a huge part of the song just cut out.
Transferring data over USB or Coax is not all that different. It uses a checksum to ensure the packet isn’t corrupt. I won’t go into how checksums work, that’s way too overkill for this post. Over TCP, the checksum is actually pretty weak. It has a 1 in 65536 chance to have a corrupt bit. That’s pretty high. But it’s ok usually. Even if you have a corrupt bit, it’s very very unlikely to affect anything at all. It’s unlikely that corrupted data is even a part of the audio file. It’s probably something else, like a header, or the checksum being corrupt but not the data, etc.
USB and Coax uses a different checksum. It uses Cyclic Redundancy Checksums (CRC). If a single bit is ever wrong, it will be rejected. Again, I can’t go too deep into all the details here of all the ways data over USB or Coax could become corrupt, because the chances are non-zero for a variety of reasons, but typically we are talking like, once a week or something where a single bit could somehow flip, and even then it’s unlikely to change anything about how the music plays back.
For this reason, I can say pretty confidently that your streamer is not losing data between it and a DAC. There’s basically no way.
Jitter is not at the level of bits. We’re on a much higher layer when talking about Jitter. I don’t have quite as much familiarity with this to be honest, my experience has to do with transmitting data, not the actual playback, or the exchange from digital to analog.
