A sign of the times?

All laughter aside it could be that there is something to this in some circumstances as uberwaltz and jafant point out. I'm sure most of us here are aware of the audible differences between CD players so it stands to reason that a disc played on a good CD player could easily sound different (warmer perhaps?) to an identical downloaded file played on a computer or inferior DAC.

In my own case I use a SACD transport and external DAC with digital downloads being played via the same DAC and I can detect no difference given identical bit/sample rates. 

His girlfriend was all agog at the depth of his knowledge. His acne was positively glowing with pride.