1s are 1s, 0s are 0s, right?

I'm not so sure about the common explanations for sonic differences caused by cables («impedance») and transports («jitter»). My own experiences with digital cables tell me that impedance isn't the decisive factor, there are others, like materials used and conductor geometry/profile. I found the sonic impact of transports to be even clearly higher than with cables. Given that many good transports have very similar jitter patterns on a low level, I don't think that jitter should be seen as solely responsible for the sonic differences, which according to my experience often appear in the level of the sound balance -- which seems to be impossible anyway, looking at the even frequency responses measured with DACs, independent of the connected transports.

Believe me, the differences are real, not imaginated, and very obvious in the case of transports. Well, the mentioned explanation attempts obviously are the only ones available at present, so it's logical to give them a certain plausibility. But this shouldn't be mixed up with assured knowledge.

Ed Meitner has some good articles on this subject on the web, especially an interview with him I read, by one of the major magazines. It's on the web.

Eldatford, yes, I was thinking about jitter. Yes, if everything works perfectly, but, even in a self diagnosing system things don't always work out perfectly.

I am quite happly with my system's audio quality and I don't feel the urge to spent $6000 or so to find out if an esoteric player would sound better. (I have other interests to spend money on).

It's true that my experience with digital communications is in the context of very high-tech military equipment (missile guidance systems) and the techniques that we use may not always be utilized in audio equipment, although I can't see why not since the cost of doing things right would not be great.

In summary, to address the wrong ideas that I hear most often...

digital pulse distortion, be it pulse shape due to line reflections, or timing (jitter) should have no effect.

Error correction is not bad. The purpose of error correction is not to correct errors. It is to permit higher bandwidth communications by operating the hardware so fast that (correctable) errors do occur. You give away, say 50%, of your bandwidth to redundancy, so that you can run, say 5 times, faster.

D/A non-monotonicity would cause audible distortion, but I am not aware of this being a problem with modern electronics.

Eldatford, I didn't mean to suggest relative value and how you should spend your money.