To whom it may concern,
https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5a3608c8-0cf3-458b-a68e-6bfd1564ec15
All the best,
Nonoise
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?
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@nonoise I can't view that. I must not have paid the 25% tariff, so it wouldn't load. I know it wasn't addressed to me anyway. @lalitk Doing very well friend! hope you are doing the same! Yes the Eufrodites are what I am listening to at the moment until system #2 is completed, and then I will alternate between the two. And yes, most don't have a clue what these things are. I can't wait to get them into the 12' ceiling room; the "1's and 0's" will sound so much better in there. And since you mentioned it: My fibre optic experiment I also found inferior to using copper from the Cisco 2960 switch to Etherregen- added some extra sharpness, but less smooth- and not inclined to try any "fancy audiophile" connectors. |
"@sns Still, one can benefit from a 'clean' home network." This needs to be clearly defined. Are we talking about a clean network, or clean components from an audiophile stance? Sadly, us audio guys try to treat networking like our stereo systems. They are not even close to being the same. Have had several people say they have a "clean" network for streaming. Sadly, you do not. You have a network segment, separate from your home network. This does not give you any benefits to steaming. If you want a "clean" network, it takes a ton of work to keep all traffic off the network except for streaming traffic. In networking we call this "air-gaped" You have a network bridge, and firewall, sometimes a dedicated point to point VPN, or packet encapsulations. Then you do some port forwarding, QoS, segmentation, setup the firewall to only allow the ports needed on the streamer, along with closing off all other traffic, etc... I can put a packet sniffer on any of these clean networks, and in about 10 sec of sampling tell you all the "noise" on your network. This all means nothing. If you have a 100g network, a few thousand bits of network traffic will have 0 affect on your streaming. My point is, having a streaming network is mostly pointless unless your main subnet is full, and/or is having any kind of packet collision issues. Now if we are talking about WiFi, that is an entirely different issue. No enterprise gear will have networking and WiFi in the same package. Wifi is also "air-gaped" while being radio, it will not contain anything ridding on the original packet from the source to the destination. FWIW, I used to work for the company that supplies the full racks to AWS that AWS runs on. Was an engineer then architect, dealing with server farms over a thousand racks. Being on-call to AWS, and working 80hs a week was not for me.
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