Digital transmission is analog, the interpretation is digital. How can voltage or current be digital, digital does not exist in the physical world.
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
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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respectfully disagree. maybe i’m not following, but not sure your objection is any different for measuring dacs. regardless, others have done it; for example, you can measure at several different dacs with a control source (e.g., a computer) showing jitter and signal to noise ratios - at the dacs - for both the computer and the streamer, and then do same for other streamers against same control (computer). that’s just one way, which is how paul miller (hifi news) has done it. if you look at his measurements, it shows that dac performance on jitter and noise dominates. that outcome is consistent with what the folks at Benchmark have said - that their dac’s performance is agnostic as to the streamer. |
@invalid technically true, but it is like AM-FM. Both transmit analog but FM is more advanced that AM. Digital is ultimately beams of light in a fiber or modulated currents in a twisted pair or coax cable, or radio waves of a satellite link. but it is also designed to be error-free, otherwise that Word doc you are opening from a server half a globe away would be garbled. |
- 191 posts total