Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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RE: Tidal on Bluesound

Posted by cawson@onetel.com on February 28, 2017 at 04:01:12:
Thanks but you're confusing me here and I'd like to be clear on what is actually happening.

A CD is made and is entirely digital with, let's say 6000,005 bits of information. If I rip this CD to the hard drive in my NAS, my ripping software isn't happy until it's extracted 600,005 bits.

If Tidal or Qubuz offer me that CD as a 16/44.1 stream, I'd expect my receiving device (my NAD M12 with Bluos card or my Sonos) to receive 600,005 bits - no more, no less, no analogue.

I have no "computer" in the system apart from one to select my music and to control my hardware - it doesn't touch the music.

Up to now everything is 100% digital and 100% identical to the CD itself, except that if I play the CD in a player, it is likely to pick up less than 600,005 bits but will make up the missing bits with its error correction circuits.

Are you agreeing with is or not so far? As I understand it, this is why music that's been effectively ripped from a CD onto a hard drive should sound marginally better than playing the CD itself in real time.

Now, the digital flow of bits (sent in "packages" by my NAS drive or by Tidal, etc) is worked on by my NAD M12 to produce an accurate and real time stream of bits that it sends down the AES/EBU cable to my DAC.

So far everything is 100% digital but instead of being packaged, it's now a real time stream. This work is done by the NAD, irrespective of where the packages of data came from.

The DAC converts to analogue - the first time since the music came down the microphone cables in the studio that it has been analogue, unless it was an old analogue recording in which case it was digitised some time later, but still before it found its way onto a CD.

Please correct me if any of this is incorrect. I can understand why streamed music may suffer from dropouts or other problems relating to the actual transmission of data between the server in the sky (or wherever Tidal or Qobuz keep their hardware) and my router, but I can't see why one file of 6000,005 bits should be any different from another.

Now for illustration, I've said 600,005 bits, but conversion to FLAC should losslessly reduce this to a smaller bit count, but I'd expect that bit count to be identical on my hard drive or those owned by Tidal or Qobuz. Thanks