Basically, "yes" but with one big caveat. For most of the time transports have been on this earth, they transmitted the data over SPDIF, in the original mode, which was isochronous. That meant that the timing of each sample transmitted was determined by the goodness of the clocking of the transport and the goodness of the recovery by the DAC.
So if there was jitter in the transport, the music is compromised. I wont go into the math, but consider the "bits" the X-axis and the timing the Y axis, draw a curve and you get the idea.
USB, and a newer mode of SPDIF, are asynchronous. In asynch protocols the transport, streamer, or well-trained parakeet just sends the data and the DAC gathers it up, reads it into memory, and re-times it. So NOW the jitter is almost entirely under the DAC's control. Other issues, such as digital noise enter the picture, but let's stay on the big difference for simplicity - and that's timing and jitter.
So the inference is that DACs today are less dependent on the goodness of the timing of the signal than in the older transport days. So my answer is "yes, exactly, but its less relevant today".
My two pence,
and I design the stuff,
G
So if there was jitter in the transport, the music is compromised. I wont go into the math, but consider the "bits" the X-axis and the timing the Y axis, draw a curve and you get the idea.
USB, and a newer mode of SPDIF, are asynchronous. In asynch protocols the transport, streamer, or well-trained parakeet just sends the data and the DAC gathers it up, reads it into memory, and re-times it. So NOW the jitter is almost entirely under the DAC's control. Other issues, such as digital noise enter the picture, but let's stay on the big difference for simplicity - and that's timing and jitter.
So the inference is that DACs today are less dependent on the goodness of the timing of the signal than in the older transport days. So my answer is "yes, exactly, but its less relevant today".
My two pence,
and I design the stuff,
G