We Need To Talk About Ones And Zeroes

@ghdprentice said... "All the sound quality stuff happens after being caught and translated into analog."

Yes, this! What the OP was illustrating by his description of the infrastructure used to support some of the popular streaming platforms is, we're all drinking from essentially the same well. We're all pretty much getting the same one's and zeros. 

Whether that is "good or bad" I'll leave to the reader. What that does however is level the playing field when it comes to streaming. How we each individually handle this homogenious supply of media is what ultimately differentiates what we hear. 

Barring obvious impediments like a noisy switch in the chain or other such physical issues, the stream will be exactly the same. Where it begins to differ is in how each consumer, us, handles it. Be it hard wiring directly from a cable modem or using wifi or perhaps fiber, the changes start there. Now add in the infinite combinations of streamers, DACs, preamps, amps, integrateds, speakers, heaphones, room treatments and dare I say it, cables, and we get what we get.

This is analogous to playing two identical LPs on two different turntables with different cartriges... Think about it.

To me the beauty of this avocation of ours is we can each tailor the sound until we get what we find most satisfying according to our tastes and budget. And there are limitless, space and budget constraints aside, possibilities to try.

And again, as always, I say...

Happy listening.

I do not understand your post and believe your conclusion false.  You have attempted to use syllogistic deductive reasoning.  Let me attempt to explain where this fails.  Please forgive in advance my philosophical pontification for I am a product of my Jesuit Fordham University education with its mandatory philosophy/theology core for a BS degree.  

Your major premise is that digital systems transmit and process nothing less and nothing more than packets packets of ones and zeroes .  You seek agreement.  We all can agree by deductive reasoning this is correct.  

Your minor premise is that these digital packets successfully travel thousands of miles through AWS' digital sewer, only to arrive in our homes completely unscathed ones and zeroes.  Facts prove this premise false.  The transmission of digital data over the WWW introduces a number of errors that cause distortion including, without limitation:

1. Jitter, the distortion we are all most familiar with. ​​​​​​
2. Transmission impairments: signal distortion, attenuation
3. Noise:  From EMI which includes RFI, introduced during transmission. A 

Your syllogistic conclusion is that therefore, this demonstrates that digital transmission protocols just work flawlessly .   Based on the data, this is false. If the protocols were flawless the errors causing distortion would not be present. Removing these errors is feasible but not practical due to cost.  

The correct conclusion by deductive reasoning is that the design of the transmission protocol and systems are adequate because even though errors, are introduced, these errors can be adequately corrected or removed  during processing and conversion of the digital stream to an analog signal.by the design of the DAC.  This seems to be the future discussion you indicated we should progress to.  Good sound quality goes even further than the processing of the ones and zeros to an analog signal.  The design of the DAC’s analog output stage is the most critical subsystem that impacts sound quality.  
 
 

So much misunderstanding on how networking and computing work. 

AWS/Cloud = some one else computer

All cloud platforms are just server farms that you pay to use. There are several tiers and quality. You can even pay AWS for a specific server that is all yours not shared. 

Networking can be very complex, go through several conversions. Anything sent from the East coast to the West coast is converted to optical, will stay that way till the last couple hops. Sadly it will go through the optical/coax conversion a few times before getting to your house. 

There is network jitter that gets sorted through packet headers. Each packet has a lot of info in it that is not the music 1/0's. Packets come out of time, sequence, in short burst. You do not get a dedicated stream of a song, you get a lot of small burst of data, that the DAC will piece into a song. There is built in error correction, and it's a send/receive/send service. Google TCP/IP packet protocols. 

Never in my engineering life, has any networking "noise" caused any computing issue. Servers all use clean power, and they try to separate the power from the data, but it's not always possible. They always use the provided power cords that go into rack long power strips. 

Think years of analog audio with all the rules has bleed over to digital, some of is the same, but a lot of it is garbage. Packets do not contain any noise, cat cables do not carry noise. Think most of the issues is poor consumer network components, poor component placement, DAC's that introduce noise in the D/A conversion. 

@mswale well audiofoolia is filled with people who talk like they're authorities on things but just learned some terms from a forum some years back and are regurgitating it every year till they believe they know more than people who actually work in those fields. That is how you get people confidently saying bull and thinking they're having some intellectual showdown. It's exhausting 

@mswale, I agree with you.

@jsalerno277  you wrote:

Your minor premise is that these digital packets successfully travel thousands of miles through AWS’ digital sewer, only to arrive in our homes completely unscathed ones and zeroes.  Facts prove this premise false.  The transmission of digital data over the WWW introduces a number of errors that cause distortion including, without limitation:

1. Jitter, the distortion we are all most familiar with. ​​​​​​
2. Transmission impairments: signal distortion, attenuation
3. Noise:  From EMI which includes RFI, introduced during transmission.

Your statement is incorrect.  The 3 bullet points impact the "signal" at the digital to analog stage.  Not during the digital to digital transmission.

I’m a computer/network/server guy with over 40 years experience in the field.  I was working with networking systems when "ethernet" was still using coax cable and what we call the Internet (i.e. World Wide Web) didn’t even exist yet.

All network transmission protocols, such as TCPIP, Netbios, etc., whether through the Internet, on a corporate LAN, or on your residential WLAN/LAN, have safeguards built in.  They are designed to insure that the data transmitted and received at either end is correct, bit by bit.  If there is any descripancy, it will request that the data packet be resent over and over again, until it is right.  Even a CD player has safeguards to guard against read errors, it’s called oversampling.  (Something nobody even thinks about anymore since it is so reliable.)

And think about it for a minute.  If the data stream is even a little bit wrong, even one bit of data flipped from a 0 to a 1, it would cause corruption that could be a financial transaction to be wrong, or a database to contain the wrong information, or a music file to be corrupted.  And once the data has been digitized, the network transmission/receipt doesn’t differentiate between the type of data (i.e financial, video, scientific, or even music), it is just a string of 0 and 1’s.  That is the beauty of digital transmission.  What is sent is what is received.  And you should be thankful that is correct, otherwise you might find the decimal place on an online credit card transaction to be one place to the right of where it should be.

Jitter, EMI noise, data buffers running dry do to slowness, etc. don’t affect the correctness of the digital data. They effect the ability of the D to A processor and software to convert it back into an analog output.