netchord wrote: > there's a 3rd possibility- the same bits are being "interpreted", or > communicated, differently by some of the devices on the network. i > postulated iTunes integration, or lack there of, might have some, > previously unexamined effect, perhaps a minuscule increase in jitter, or > some other digital artifact- transmitting music bits is not the same as > send text over a network.
This is simply not true. Once they hit the network interface they are exactly the same as sending text (or images or program code or *anything*) over the network. Again, digital music files are not special because they contain data that gets converted at the destination to analog representations of sound waves. Jitter is a question of how that data is assembled and handled by the DAC. It has nothing to do with TCP/IP network communications. If you don't get the data from the server to the DAC, you will see rebuffering issues or disconnections, not subtle variations in sound quality. If there are digital artifacts, they are either present in the encoded digital file, meaning they were introduced during the analog to digital conversion, or they are a consequence of how the DAC has decoded the data it receives. They are not introduced by the transmission of the data over your network. The network protocols which allow any of this to work have checksums and error correction to verify that the data sent is the data received and do so on relatively small amounts of data at a time. Most home networks use a default Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of 1500 bytes. A typical ethernet packet, including headers and data is 1530 bytes. Every one of those packets is guaranteed by the specification of the protocol to arrive at its destination complete and in sequential order. If an error occurs, the packet is re-transmitted. It's possible that software on the server (i.e. transcoding on the server) modifies those files *before* transmitting them. Maybe the files were being transcoded before and they are not now. I don't know. But I am 100% certain that "the network" i.e. device interfaces, routers and switches are not the place to look for any sound quality differences of the type you are describing. Win7Pro(x64)[3.3Ghz i5, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD system, 15TB storage], LMS 7.9.0 -> Logitech Squeezebox Classic V.3 -> Cambridge Audio DacMagic -> NAD C160 -> 2 x NAD C272 -> Quad 22L2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ get.amped's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10022 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
