why expensive streamers
@soix and others
I am unclear about the effect on sound of streamers (prior to getting to the dac). Audio (even hi-res) has so little information content relative to the mega and giga bit communication and processing speeds (bandwidth, BW) and cheap buffering supported by modern electronics that it seems that any relatively cheap piece of electronics would never lose an audio bit.
Here is why. Because of the huge amount of BW relative to the BW needs of audio, you can send the same audio chunk 100 times and use a bit checking algorithm (they call this "check sum") to make sure just one of these sets is correct. With this approach you would be assured that the correct bits would be transfered. This high accuracy rate would mean perfect audio bit transfer.
What am I missing? Why are people spending 1000's on streamers?
thx
@mashif - the article is about DA conversion. Jitter is not an issue in networks like Internet. |
@nigeltheflash - but then adding DDC synchronized with DAC clock should be eliminating differences between streamers since it fixes USB issues. Converting packets to stream is not proprietary software, it the same Linux network stack everywhere. I am pretty sure everything is heavily buffered (tens of seconds of music), RAM is cheap this days. |
@8th-note - CD won't necessarily be better. CD transports also have jitter and CD reading may be unreliable. In fact, I think FLAC stream is way more bit-perfect, than a Red Book CD data retrieval. Better comparison would be playback of the same track off USB thumb drive - excludes network issues. |
@mikhailark exactly, a data stream doesn't have any other attributes and qualities, which is why I am still waiting for an explanation, what an expensive streamer does differently than one that "just works"
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