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
That is not true. Services such as Qobuz and Tidal use TCP/IP, which is a bit perfect protocol. Data arrive in packets and faulty packets are resent. |
so, to be potentially off topic, from a software point of view, streaming is a method. It has nothing to do with data loss, error handling, the quality of the data, etc. The content (5 seconds of a cat video, pdf file or song) is converted into bytes and sent from one endpoint to another. The client endpoint will receive it and convert it back to "content". In between there is "networking stuff" that I know little about and won’t google it (so that e.g. I still don’t say stuff that would embarrass my offspring who spent 4 years in College to understand the "networking stuff".) If you want to play 5 frames of the cat video, 5 seconds of a song, you will need to receive the data that comes in a form of a stream. It has the beginning and end, x amount of bytes. The programmer writing the software that handles the data assumes it is 100% the same data the server sent. What we also call streaming is the concept that we don’t need to receive the 6th seconds of a song to play the first 5. We just assume that we will have it in time, before the 5th seconds of the song has played. We can add business rules to our playing procedures such as we won’t play the song unless the entire song has completed streaming (in which case, it’s not really streaming but downloading.) I feel these concepts are easily confused - as shown in this thread. I would go on about lossless and lossy formats and compressions and how Spotify changed business rules to get around receiving all the data that was sent and "just move on and play something" and never wait for the lost pockets - if I had know more than I can google. But I don’t, music streaming is a different animal than streaming data for maps and location data that I work on. Still, this is a very educational thread despite our different understanding/ misunderstandings of various issues around streaming...
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Streaming is not a new technology. I for one have been streaming since about 2004 (starting with the original Yamaha Musiccast system). Moreover, the fundamental job of the streamer, moving a data stream from server to dac, is rather simple. And sorry to be a skipping record, but even most high $ streamer proponents agree it’s just about jitter and other noise. So measure it! Btw, I volunteer for the reassembler chamber… |
@mdalton I wasn't talking about losing or dropping packets and the tech used to ensure it all gets there. I was talking about noise creeping into the many places it can from sender to receiver and that it can corrupt what can be heard. The analogy of the CDP should have made that clear, having such short distances being all handled internally. Apologies if I wasn't clear on that. On another note, please check for those errant flies before volunteering. All the best,
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