If all the opaque but purportedly game-changing technical differences in capability from increasingly expensive streamer models is so audible, why is streaming not doomed from the get-go since it’s sourced from audio-firestorm data centers? Those places are certainly not set up mechanically or logistically to cater to audiophile concerns as a priority.
why expensive streamers
@soix and others
I am unclear about the effect on sound of streamers (prior to getting to the dac). Audio (even hi-res) has so little information content relative to the mega and giga bit communication and processing speeds (bandwidth, BW) and cheap buffering supported by modern electronics that it seems that any relatively cheap piece of electronics would never lose an audio bit.
Here is why. Because of the huge amount of BW relative to the BW needs of audio, you can send the same audio chunk 100 times and use a bit checking algorithm (they call this "check sum") to make sure just one of these sets is correct. With this approach you would be assured that the correct bits would be transfered. This high accuracy rate would mean perfect audio bit transfer.
What am I missing? Why are people spending 1000's on streamers?
thx
Showing 2 responses by benanders
I too appreciate the wife-was-stunned-by-the-diff factor. But if it’s after a spouse was known to be fidgeting with kit, that’s just another likely expression of bias. Clever Hans was an instructive fellow. No one seems to have an answer as to why data centers aren’t meaningful sources of perceptible signal degradation for music streaming services. Are all data centers imagined to be of equivalent quality and capability in a world where one streamer company can engineer several tiered devices that make sound remarkably different on the other end of the chain, based on whatever departs any given data center worldwide?
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