:o) I think that getting the right bits in the right order at the right time into the DAC is the very essence of digital music reproduction. Get it wrong up to this point and the music is damaged.
Turning the numbers into music is where the real problems should start. With the SB and accurate rips, getting the right bits is basically fixed - but of course the timing is still an issue - that's why we should focus on the DAC and how it deals with inbound jtter (which admittedly is low with SB 2/3) and of course how well the recovered analogue signal is handled. I wasn't talking about networks, I was talking about (for example) the m-board bus - and things have to happen pretty fast and pretty reliably there, with lots of square waves being interpreted very unambiguously. My "at the right time" phrase was supposed to cover-off jitter. Reading out of a buffer (with or without upsampling) using an independent clock right next to the DAC is going to lose most (maybe all?) of the inbound transport/spdif induced jitter - and if there is correlated jitter coming out of the transport, then the designer wants shooting (IMHO). Uncorrelated jitter is a different beast. I'm not convinced that sending a bitstream to a DAC represents an isynchronous network. Surely the transmitter is blind to the receiver? If anything, it's a broadcast... Anyway I think this is more interesting than trying to decide if any real person can hear any real difference between FLAC, WAV or server vs SB-side decoding. I know I can't - and more importantly - neither can my wife!. YMMV -- Phil Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21700 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
