We Need To Talk About Ones And Zeroes
Several well-respected audiophiles in this forum have stated that the sound quality of hi-res streamed audio equals or betters the sound quality of traditional digital sources.
These are folks who have spent decades assembling highly desirable systems and whose listening skills are beyond reproach. I for one tend to respect their opinions.
Tidal is headquartered in NYC, NY from Norwegian origins. Qobuz is headquartered in Paris, France. Both services are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud infrastructure services giant that commands roughly one third of the world's entire cloud services market.
AWS server farms are any audiophile's nightmare. Tens of thousands of multi-CPU servers and industrial-grade switches crammed in crowded racks, miles of ordinary cabling coursing among tens of thousands of buzzing switched-mode power supplies and noisy cooling fans. Industrial HVAC plants humming 24/7.
This, I think, demonstrates without a doubt that audio files digitally converted to packets of ones and zeroes successfully travel thousands of miles through AWS' digital sewer, only to arrive in our homes completely unscathed and ready to deliver sound quality that, by many prominent audiophiles' account, rivals or exceeds that of $5,000 CD transports.
This also demonstrates that digital transmission protocols just work flawlessly over noise-saturated industrial-grade lines and equipment chosen for raw performance and cost-effectiveness.
This also puts in perspective the importance of improvements deployed in the home, which is to say in the last ten feet of our streamed music's multi-thousand mile journey.
No worries, I am not about to argue that a $100 streamer has to sound the same as a $30,000 one because "it's all ones and zeroes".
But it would be nice to agree on a shared-understanding baseline, because without it intelligent discourse becomes difficult. The sooner everyone gets on the same page, which is to say that our systems' digital chains process nothing less and nothing more than packets of ones and zeroes, the sooner we can move on to genuinely thought-provoking stuff like, why don't all streamers sound the same? Why do cables make a difference? Wouldn't that be more interesting?
@jeffbij re "Even a CD player has safeguards to guard against read errors, it’s called oversampling." CD error correction is based in Cross Interleave Reed Solomon coding. Oversampling is primarily used to allow shallower slope anti-aliasing filters. |
Unfortunately, I am old enough to remember the launch of CD. An astonishing 10 bits (roughly) are used for every 1 bit of the signal. The claim is that errors can be detected and corrected for up to 4,000 consecutive bit errors, and there is no obvious discontinuity if 7,000 bits are wrong. As a demonstration, a 1/8 inch hole was drilled right through a CD and it played with no apparent adverse effects. Philips knew the benefits of four-times oversampling from the get go which is why its early CD players sounded better than the competition. Oversampling allows much gentler filters to be used. Philips also recognised the difficulty of trimming resistors in their resistance ladder DACs, and only bothered to decode the most significant 14 bits. PCM advocates should understand that none of this matters with Direct Stream Digital, where the low pass filter is in the mega-Hertz region and every bit is equally important. |
As I read it's 3:1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio
I fear this is misreading the eight to fourteen modulation (EFM). In any event, this was 43 years ago and hardly worth discussing to consider the value of Redbook PCM vs. DSD. |
