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Does the quality of a digital signal matter?

I recently heard a demonstration where a CD player was played with and without being supported with three Nordost Sort Kones. The difference was audible to me, but did not blow me away.

I was discussing the Sort Kones with a friend of mine that is an electrical engineer and also a musical audio guy. It was his opinion that these items could certain make an improvement in an analogue signal, but shouldn't do anything for a digital signal. He said that as long as the component receiving the digital signal can recognize a 1 or 0 then the signal is successful. It's a pass/fail situation and doesn't rely on levels of quality.

An example that he gave me was that we think nothing of using a cheap CDRW drive to duplicate a CD with no worry about the quality being reduced. If the signal isn't read in full an error is reported so we know that the entire signal has been sent.

I believe he said that it's possible to show that a more expensive digital cable is better than another, but the end product doesn't change.

There was a test done with HDMI cables that tested cables of different prices. The only difference in picture quality was noted when a cable was defective and there was an obvious problem on the display.

I realize that the most use analogue signals, but for those of us that use a receiver for our D/A, does the CD players quality matter? Any thoughts?
mceljo
mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 
Jea48 - I currently have the SACD player hooked up in 2 channel analog mode so I'm not even listening to the multi-channel versions. I think most, if not all, SACDs have stereo versions. I don't really care about the multi-channel because my rear channel speakers are no where near the qualility of my Focals.

2 channel standard vs. 2 channel SACD is what I'm comparing. I'm planning to swap the disk and compare the result of standard CDs on both players, but a toslink vs. analog isn't really an equal comparision.
bryoncunningham
890 posts
 
I am a believer in the audibility of jitter. Here is another link to some useful information about jitter. I have also found a lot of useful discussion of this topic in the A'gon archives.

My conversion to believing in the audibility of jitter occurred when I added a reclocker to my system, which discards the timing data from a S/PDIF signal and reclocks it using a high precision clock. The addition of the reclocker resulted in significant improvement in perceived resolution, among other things.
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shadorne
7,477 posts
 
Shadorne - I'm not sure how this interpolation works. Is it happening also when I use program that rips CD as data (like MAX) - I hope not. Do you know?

Not sure if the software or drive will conceal an error or not but from what I understand - only damaged (scratched) CD's are likely to require interpolation, as the error correction (although less rigorous than data CD's) should be more than enough for well looked after CD's. The CD's error rate is very low - certainly much lower than the number of glitches coming out of the studio and on to the CD master. Only a few out of one thousand CD's should require interpolation in a few places (when in new and unscratched condition).
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shadorne
7,477 posts
 
Above when I say "not sure" - what I mean is that the software can tell the drive what to do and I don't know if MAX software is telling the drive "not to interpolate" uncorrectable errors. Some softwares will do this and then you get an error report during ripping so you know for sure that the original CD was not readable and your rip is not "bit perfect".
aplhifi
515 posts
 
.....original CD was not readable and your rip is not "bit perfect".

"Bit perfect" always reminds me of "bits are bits". :-)

In both cases, when it comes to audio quality, this is not really true (it's irrelevant), IMHO!

Best,

Alex Peychev
www.aplhifi.com
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