We Need To Talk About Ones And Zeroes
Several well-respected audiophiles in this forum have stated that the sound quality of hi-res streamed audio equals or betters the sound quality of traditional digital sources.
These are folks who have spent decades assembling highly desirable systems and whose listening skills are beyond reproach. I for one tend to respect their opinions.
Tidal is headquartered in NYC, NY from Norwegian origins. Qobuz is headquartered in Paris, France. Both services are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure services giant that commands roughly one third of the world's entire cloud services market.
AWS server farms are any audiophile's nightmare. Tens of thousands of multi-CPU servers and industrial-grade switches crammed in crowded racks, miles of ordinary cabling coursing among tens of thousands of buzzing switched-mode power supplies and noisy cooling fans. Industrial HVAC plants humming 24/7.
This, I think, demonstrates without a doubt that audio files digitally converted to packets of ones and zeroes successfully travel thousands of miles through AWS' digital sewer, only to arrive in our homes completely unscathed and ready to deliver sound quality that, by many prominent audiophiles' account, rivals or exceeds that of $5,000 CD transports.
This also demonstrates that digital transmission protocols just work flawlessly over noise-saturated industrial-grade lines and equipment chosen for raw performance and cost-effectiveness.
This also puts in perspective the importance of improvements deployed in the home, which is to say in the last ten feet of our streamed music's multi-thousand mile journey.
No worries, I am not about to argue that a $100 streamer has to sound the same as a $30,000 one because "it's all ones and zeroes".
But it would be nice to agree on a shared-understanding baseline, because without it intelligent discourse becomes difficult. The sooner everyone gets on the same page, which is to say that our systems' digital chains process nothing less and nothing more than packets of ones and zeroes, the sooner we can move on to genuinely thought-provoking stuff like, why don't all streamers sound the same? Why do cables make a difference? Wouldn't that be more interesting?
USB was developed almost 30 years ago to replace and consolidate the old serial, parallel and PS/2 ports for PC peripherals, and later became ubiquitous in small electronics chargers. How this pedestrian interface became quasi-standard in high-end digital audio is puzzling. USB evolved tremendously over the decades and USB4 is a powerhouse, however many of today’s high-end DACs and streamers are still stuck in the USB 2.0 era.
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So much basic misinformation here! I beseech you to understand what the word streaming means in digital networks, and how it differs from file transfers. At its simplest, streaming prioritises getting something out (timeliness), over getting it right. With streaming it is OK if some packets go missing, or get horribly corrupted, as long as there is a more or less steady stream of packets. I beseech you to understand the difference between Internet Protocol (IP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). IP deals with basic network addressing. TCP works on top of IP and includes error detection and recovery, guaranteeing accurate delivery of messages and files but not timeliness. A TCP/IP transfer is not complete until the entire message has been transmitted, checked and corrected. If you want to 'stream' using TCP/IP without packet loss, you cannot start playback until the 'stream' has completed. In other words, the stream has become a file transfer! UDP also works on top of IP but does not guarantee delivery. In general, UDP/IP is the protocol used for streaming, because it does not bother to stop and ask for retransmission. Think about multicasting where a single stream is fed to a large number of receivers. Not all receivers will get exactly the same packets because of transmission losses, which are not individually corrected! I also beseech you to understand that Ethernet, on its own, does not guarantee packet delivery any more than pigeon post offers a delivery guarantee. Sure, most pigeons will get home most of the time, but some sometimes get lost, get picked off by hawks, get shot down, or die on the wing. On top of all this, even USB does not guarantee accuracy when streaming. I recently posted in another thread: From Wikipedia USB - Wikipedia
So there is no such single thing as USB. It is no longer even Serial! There are now nine families of USB connectors. For example, the USB-C connector has 24 pins and looks more like the purpose designed HDMI which is Parallel and eschews data packets. USB was never designed for error-free streaming.
Note the implications here. Audiophiles often believe that because files and messages can be transferred error-free, that implies streams are error-free. They aren't, but you do get your errors for free. |
