I meant stream = the end result, the sum of the packets, glued back together. The serialized data. What I know from writing code for reading data from e.g., text to binary and back. But in short I have no idea. I should read up on it before asking questions.
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
- ...
- 191 posts total
In addition to what others have said, there is a difference between streaming and data transfer via a bit perfect FTP. Banking, nuclear weapons, government records, etc can't tolerate dropped bits. they can't just guess what it should have been via interpolation. So they use a checking program and will not terminate the file transfer until it is 100% verified. That is why in the early days of the internet it took forever to download files and sometimes they would fail because they couldn't get to 100%. You don't have the luxury of this for streaming. thus dropped bits are estimated by the streamer and the music must go on. Thus we do everything we can to prevent dropped bits. And it is quite audible. Jerry |
@cleeds Quite possibly but if ethernet protocols didn’t sort this then the internet wouldn’t work. Error checking and correction are built in. The streamer input side deals with this so the output side doesn’t have to. |
@grislybutter Cool, glad to help. The signal coming out of the streamer containing 1s and 0s does incorporate a timing element. Jitter is therefore a “thing” from the streamer onwards in a way it isn’t up to that point. |
@steakster I’m really not sure that’s “as I wish”; I’m a listening first guy who then seeks to understand the physics/science which might explain what I’m hearing but the SR stuff is from a different planet. What the heck are “contouring” and “tuning” actually supposed to be doing to a digital signal? Modifying the 1s and 0s which amounts to corrupting the data? Changing the timing? Or modifying the way in which RFI noise accompanying the digital signal is handled? This sounds like leading edge witchcraft… |
- 191 posts total