Many aspects of music perception are not measurable. But when it comes to altering electrical properties in any way, there should be something the designer used to decide how to alter the electrons that is subject to measurements. If claims are made based on electrical engineering, the engineer should be able to describe the electrical changes and why it improves sound quality, even in a theoretical way. I can decide for myself, by listening, whether I like the change but I don't accept that something meaningful is happening without a reasonable scientific explanation. I believe in the mysteries of music perception but not electrical magic. Give me some kind of science.
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
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- 191 posts total
@8th-note I am with you buddy. A decent streamer (say, $2-3K) is fine, after all, that is what decent custom PC costs - nice box. no fans, screen - it all costs company to make. $20K? No, thanks. |
It would be quite straight-forward to measure the noise, rise and fall time, etc. on streamer outputs with the inputs shorted, but this is not particularly valuable since the streamer isn't doing any work under these conditions. I don't believe that there is any "reference" input signal that can be used to compare one streamer to another. The amount of noise and jitter from a streamer will depend on how clean the input signal is and what the streamer is doing (e.g. what content is being played and how it is decoded). So, while some kind of measurements are certainly possible, it's not clear how these would be useful in making comparisons. And correlating these measurements with the way a streamer sounds would be even more difficult.
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Everyone keeps talking about noise. I guess this is natural. but that isn't the main problem. The problem is dropped bits. If a bit is missing, a streamer has to improvise. guess. fill it in, often with an interpolation. So there is no noise generated by that, just an inaccuracy. I think of it as rounded edges and thinned out middles. The error correction people keep mentioning is generally not the correct term. For file transfer, there is data correction available. It will go back to the source and get the correct data. For streaming, there is not data correction, there is just "data error handling", perhaps "data error mitigation". Jerry
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- 191 posts total