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Go check Stereophile for a good introduction to high end audio.

I was actually expecting the 1812 Overture recording by Telarc. It was digitally mastered and is a well known torture test for audio systems. The cannon blasts have been known to blast your stylus off the record. https://www.stereophile.com/co...

Too bad the market doesn't seem to care about high-quality audio anymore.

There's no market because there's no need. First of all, I have to say, I'm very offended by your user ID. Macs for all? FUCK YOU~! I was forced to use Apple shit back in elementary school. From Steve Jobs fucking over Woz with the Atari chip deal, to the Apple IIs lack of sound chip and sprites, to the black and white macs with one god-damn mouse button and NO graphics processor, to their wallet-raping love of proprietary connectors and soldered-in components, to the software abortions Quicktime and iTunes, to their authoritarian attempts to control the press, to their iPhones that won't support Bluetooth file transfers to non-Apple devices, I despise every single aspect of Apple.

Having said that, let's get to why there is no need for "high-quality" audio, which by that I assume you mean > 44khz/16-bit. First, concede that you don't understand the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. You're an Apple user, which means you're not scientifically minded. Thus the formulas expressed on the Wikipedia page are completely lost on you. That's OK. All you need is a square-wave generator, the best speaker you can find, a high fidelity unidirectional microphone connected to a laboratory-grade oscilloscope. Set the generator to produce a 500hz wave. Point the microphone at the speaker and be amazed. Congratulations! You've just learned something that a million dick-sucking audiophiles never could. SPEAKERS CAN'T REPRODUCE SQUARE WAVES. Now, maybe you understand that the jagged, staircase-looking waveform that audiophiles point to and say, "See! The CD isn't giving us smooth sound", is completely irrelevant. Because that waveform IS NOT what comes out of the speaker. Now, 24, 32, 64-bit audio? Useful in the mixing process. Unnecessary everywhere else.

There are two things called jitter here. When you're ripping a CD, sometimes audio reads will not give you the same block on the disc each time you ask for it. Older ripping programs had to read multiple times to correct that. Newer drives support "Accurate Stream", which makes this sort of jitter go away altogether.

CD transports do not have this problem. CD read jitter only happens if you're trying to read audio CDs at the block level, something they weren't really designed to do. A regular CD player will not do this.

The second type is transport clock jitter. The digital interface between CD transports and DACs doesn't have a separate clock. It's derived from the data itself. That process wasn't always perfect. In the mid 90's, the recovered clock was sloppy enough that bad ones were audible. Stereophile did a useful article measuring cd transport jitter during that era.

Nowadays the clocks and clock recovery circuits are so much better, I'm skeptical this is a real issue anymore. And most computer audio players buffer their data and then generate their own clock, which completely eliminates transport jitter.

The US Patent Office..

It could be worse for Beats--they could have also violated Bose's highly innovative use of .2 in the model number.

Minimum price agreements were widely used in the heyday of CDs. The practice was upheld by courts.

I noticed this gets modded up as fact...the truth is a little more interesting http://www.stereophile.com/new... this is an article from 2000 where the Big Five got in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for "Minimum Advertised Pricing on CDs" where retailers were forbidden to *advertise* CDs below an established minimum. Unlike Apple they had heard of Sherman Antitrust Act

According to this article from 1991, they cost $1700-1900.

Assuming that they were introduced in 1991 (as opposed to "the 80s"), that would be ~$3000 in today's dollars. Stack them up against one of the ones here:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/8639...

Im not really one to argue amps (since I dont deal with them), but I would guess that theres a combination of confirmation bias, "grass is greener" / "good old days" thinking which selectively forgets issues had, and a failure to account for the substantial difference in today's dollar and the dollar 20-40 years ago. There is a lot more stuff available for a lot less money (laptops, amps, etc), which can lead people to thinking that "my $200 laptop died, therefore technology today sucks".

There is also a point to be made that today's tech has finer tolerances, and so can be less reliable; stone tablets last for absolute ages compared to harddrives, because their tolerances are so loose. Harddrive platters spin at 7200 RPM and (randomly googled fact) have ~2million bits/inch; stands to reason they will fail more and more easily than the stone tablet, but they are indisputably higher quality. Quality can be had (there are high end disk arrays which all but guarantee you will not have an outage, for example) but it costs money, and a lot of people dont want to spend it.

There is an excellent article on how CDs work and how they are made here:

http://www.stereophile.com/features/827/index.html

http://www.stereophile.com/phonopreamps/199pass/index1.html

Lossless 16-bit digital formats give you a dynamic range of 96dB, but audio engineers (according to the article) measure vinyl as having 112dB - nearly double the claim that is typically repeated but obviously not actually measured.

If you would like to refute this, please do. But not with a link to the 60dB claim. You cant refute a refutation by repeating the original. You'll need to show me something that analyzes this counter-claim and explains why it is incorrect.

..CD Player

http://www.stereophile.com/he2006/060206dynastation/index.html

I bring you the dynastation. A CD player that produces sound like no other... and it's only a measly $6000

Where'd you copy-paste that from? Oh wait, let's ask Google: From http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/digital_data_compression_musics_procrustean_bed/. Nice work, very classy.

since you can create local clocks and keep very good local time and you can get the 1's and 0's and deep buffer them and replay them once they are time-aligned with that super great local clock you have

And what happens when the "deep buffer" is empty due to excessively high latency? And that can happen if source supplies the data way too slowly for way too long time.

Also, your printer may work better if you plug the right kind of clock into the outlet next to it. Between that and the green rectangle trick, my printouts are so realistic they give me a giant Mpingo woodie every time I look at them.

The unfortunate part about that test is that they're using two fundamentally broken pieces in the "High End system". So it's both unsurprising that there was actually a regression from the cheaper stuff, and not necessarily representative of what more expensive equipment is capable of.

The "Terminator" part of the MIT Terminator speaker cables is a simple Zobel network, a cheap resistor/capacitor pair (really cheap in the case of the Terminator 3, the parts quality is terrible). That's essentially a tone control of seriously questionable value, where you have no idea how it's going to interact with the amplifier and speaker impedance. Those MIT cables measure worse and, to my ears, sound worse than cheap copper cable does.

Second, YBA power amplifiers are some of the worst scams on the market. The designer rejects negative feedback a a near religious level, so you end up with high distortion, badly changing performance based on amplifier thermals, poor ability to drive low impedance loads, and amplifiers that blow up; it's all in the review if you read that part instead of the ill-founded subjective spew. I would take a nice solid Behringer A500 any day over one of YBA's pieces of junk.

The school of high-end audio I fall into says that first, the equipment must measure extremely well. Only after passing that hurdle is it then meaningful to consider whether it sounds better or worse than another component that also measures well. That's not what happened here. This Matrix Hi-Fi test started with fundamentally, measurably flawed equipment on the "high-end" side. It's no surprise it didn't do well against the less expensive but competently engineered cheap stuff. Bravo to the testers who rejected the overpriced junk here. But you can't really extrapolate too far into the high-end audio industry from that though. It's actually hard to setup a good test in this area. So few audiophiles know enough to filter their shopping list to only includes equipment with good measurements on the electronics side that any random system you borrow for such a test can easily be crap regardless of price.

Exactly. Sort of like how optical discs don't have bits directly encoded, instead pits and lands of varying lengths along the spiral. The guy is looking for things that just aren't there (except maybe on really old hard drives).

Is fun!

Like to hear the special sound of The White Stripes, Icy Thump mixed by the audio engineer legend Steve Hoffman, in high resolution sound.
You could of course go "Meeh, I don't care.." , but then I think you are missing out on something. And I can back that up by my friends reaction listing with my gear. :)

This was my 24th, 25th 26th, year present to myself:

Headphones: AKG K701
PocketAmp: Emmeline "The Hornet"
MusicPlayer: iPod 5G with Rockbox (flac suppport)
SoundCard: Transit 24bit 96kHz, M-audio

If you are interested in music, and have some extra cash to invest. This would be my recommendation.

Cheers!

Tip: Look for Steve Hoffman, and DCC mixes.

As for the effects from optical audio cables, they're all lying sacks of shit. You either have bit loss or you don't, any changes in sound quality is a result of the AD/DA chips or speakers, not the cable.

Most digital audio interfaces have an implicit clock that is recovered from the data being transmitted. If the interface between components is crappy, you can end up with the right bits but at the wrong time. This effectively reduces the quality of the audio. As the impact has been both measurable and audible for almost 20 years now, suggesting "you either have bit loss or your don't" is provably false. There is a clear intermediate state where bits are delivered, but with enough timing jitter that the result is slightly degraded.

Cable changes aren't necessarily the best approach to resolve this though--some audio interfaces, like the common Toslink optical one, are really problematic no matter how good the cable involved is. If you have a good enough system for these problems to be audible, using a better digital transmission interface, or something that buffers and reclocks, would be better solutions.

Suggested reading on this this topic:
Jitter explained,
Digital Domain - Jitter,
Jitter, Bits, & Sound Quality

There is a reason, it's called "professional headroom": http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/297awsi/

Wrong. It's just that your old Stax really are that bad. I've tried most of them, and the only Stax headphones worth having are the SR-007 Omega 2s. I have the Alessandro version of the SR-60... somewhere. In fact, their sound is so memorable I'd I forgot I had them until I saw your post.

http://www.stereophile.com/thinkpieces/021708swiftboat/ is an example of Randi's moving targets to win the money. In this case, the starting point is "Audiophile's can't really hear the difference in cables" and specifying a specific make and model. They then add that the loser pays for all testing costs (do you want to pay for something that later appears to be rigged against you). The maker of said high-end cable decides not to play....audio writer offers to use another make/model of high-end cable...Randi says it has to "approved" by his "advisers". And so on....basically, Randi prefers to name call and rig any test beyond neutrality. He WANTS a negative result versus looking to actually prove.

CDA ("CD Audio") is a lossless format. If there's loss going from anything other than analog to CDA, then your converter is crap. Here are references from various sources that I consider credible

CDA is actually an implementation of linear PCM which, according to Wikipedia, "[t]heoretically, there is no loss or error in conversion and reconstruction, as long as the sampling rate is just over twice the highest desired frequency component of the recorded signal. . . . LPCM is further used for the lossless encoding of audio data in the compact disc Red Book standard" (emphasis added).

Stereophile, a well-respected audio magazine, compared MP3 to CDA in a section entitled "Lossless vs Lossy."

Hydrogen Audio, a great resource for audio work, has users that say things such as "In clearer terms, converting your MP3s to CD-Audio will not degrade the sound quality relative to the mp3, but will, relative to the original file." Other users in the same thread refer to MP3->CDA as "lossless."

People in other fora say that CDA is lossless: "So when you burn a CD from your Apple Lossless files, the tracks that are burned to CD are exact duplicates of those ripped from the original CD"; "Audio can be converted from Lossless to the original format, and if you compare them you find bit-for-bit identical files"; etc.

http://www.stereophile.com/cables/1206tara/index1.html

scan for "Back on the ground" & pick your jaw off the floor

Sadly, these sort of reviews are commonplace, http://www.stereophile.com/ being the worst offender. These people give us music lovers a bad name.

Luckily, there's http://www.theaudiocritic.com/. This great old guy measures gear using lab bench equipment and double blind listening tests at levels matched within +/-0.1dB, and posts the results on his website (all free).

I'm surprised no other /.er posted this. There must be some of out there who love music?

I agree with all the others on tubing, that and huge junction boxes and you can go nuts when all the rest is done. Just remember if you put everything in one central enclosure, make it big and ventilated. Also, if any 3 phase high current runs (not sure about US, this is used as feeder where I live) its best to use cable as opposed to wire runs in a tube, as a cable it wont make much of a magnetic field (the twisted wires in the cable cancel eachother). If you want a good listening room, it might be worth treating the walls as it can make a huge difference in sound quality. http://www.stereophile.com/reference/31/index.html is a good start. Personally I would never put speakers in the wall, and would rather buy 2 good speakers for stereo than 7 crappy ones for surround :) Separate heavy wire power runs to this room is a good idea, to avoid appliances etc. interfering. Good luck!

I've been reading all these articles for years now. And I find it laughable how these so called "analysts" predict future growth potential for their industries.

- "Study Predicts $42.8 Billion Music Market by 2005"
http://www.stereophile.com/news/10837/
http://p2pnet.net/story/1167?PHPSESSID=b43903d88ca b374c1c0915849c2c4c92

- "The video game industry will grow to $50 billion by 2008"
http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2005/02/v ideo_game_grow.html

Then it looks like these industries seem to think they are entitled to this money, that they should be getting. And if they aren't hitting the numbers, then something must be wrong! People must be stealing their music, or their movies, or their video games. Perhaps, maybe there's just too much competition in their industry - and a lot of the players must die off?

In reality, people face an increased rise in the cost of living. But they're not making any more money. So these entertainment industries are competing for precious dollars that need to be spent elsewhere.

How about some breakdowns:

- Salaries are stagnant across the nation. LA, SF, and NYC are the large cities. The salaries there should be higher than anywhere else, but companies hate, and I emphasize "hate" to pay any more than $50k/year for a person. $70k/year starts to afford you a mini-comfortable life, but you still got to watch your expenses. Six-figure incomes seems to be the holy grail that everyone wants to achieve - but not everyone can. And most people with good jobs, are already working 50-60 hours a week, this also includes travel time, lunch time, and preparation time in the mornings.

- Property values in the large cities have skyrocketed. You need to make over $125,000 annually just to qualify for a $500k home. This started after the dot-com boom. People with extra money buying up property. Then everyone tried to get into the house flipping craze, which really artificially jacked up property value. People are signing off on 30 and 40 year mortgages now.

- So this jacks up the rent. Rent keeps increasing. California is quickly becoming a land of renters. $1050/month is the minimum you can expect to pay for a tiny 1-bedroom apartment in LA. The only way to keep your cost of living low is to have 2 or 3 roommates. Unless you want to live in the ghettos with ghetto-birds always flying around your neighborhood at night. There you might find a 1-bedroom apartment for $700 - make sure to wear a bullet-proof vest.

- Energy costs have gone up. LA's average for gasoline is $2.50/gallon for 87 octane. $2.90/gallon for 91 octane. People are spending $125/month on gasoline now just to commute to work.

- Anyone with a job has car expenses. If they have a newer car, they'll have monthly car payments. If they have an older car, all paid off, they'll have maintenance expenses, and risk of the car breaking down. And there's the insurance cost to drive in LA.

- Most people have a cell phone now, which is $60/month.
- Internet - cable modem is $50/month.
- Cable TV - Basic cable is now $50/month.
- Food will cost you $300/month, if you want to eat cheap.

- And most people with a good job, also has student loans to pay off - which can range from $25k to $60k. And whatever credit card expenses they incurred during college when they didn't have a job.

- And if you're a guy, and you want a girlfriend, then you've got "dating expenses." Clubs love to charge guys $25 for cover, and let the girls in for free. Drinks in Hollywood are $13/piece.

And now... I can get to the entertainment expenses.
- A movie ticket is $10/piece.
- Then there are all the other fun things that you want to do to enjoy

He apparently invented an orchestra, too.

National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra

http://www.stereophile.com/news/021907hatto/

If it were an artifact of noise in my system... I'd know it, I'm familiar with what that sounds like and this isn't it. Perhaps "hum" isn't the right were, it's more high pitched then that, like a step below a dog whistle but "shaped" like a hum. As for my setup. I've got well over $3K into it including a Acoustic Research Power Cleaner. None of my other media make this noise, just 4 out of my 5 SACDs... that is before I sold all of them and the player because of it (the 5th disc that didn't make the noise was the one that let me know it was the media and not the player, researching similar people had the same experience and found it was the watermark).

Tests have shown that 50% of listeners can detect the watermark while listening. Considering the type of people who buy this kind of tech I guarantee most of them are in the range that can detect it. At this point I prefer DVD-A because I don't hear any artifacts from the "protection"

1. Right. I forgot they were selling to aging baby boomers. And it appears that low bitrate mp3 files do discard spectral information above 16-18 kHz Since Apple sells low bitrate stuff, it stands to reason. At the same time, though, they have a lossless codec, and their airport does have a spdif connector

2. ah well, when the stereo speakers are positioned that closely together, I suppose it doesn't quite matter if stereo imaging of bass is theoretically possible. My stereo's recommends a crossover of 150 hz for 90 mm drivers. But if the wavelength (2.3 metres) is long enough...

3. Apple itself wants this to replace older systems.

"Introducing the stereo for the new century."
"Wide frequency range: iPod Hi-Fi accurately reproduces the lowest cello notes and the highest piccolo notes; the brittle strum of an acoustic guitar and the powerful thump of a driving bass"

Let's see:

Lowest Cello note: C2 65.41 Hz
Highest Piccolo note: that's not terribly impressive

I suppose Apple took one look at Bose, and decided that selling overpriced audio gadgets was more lucrative than coming out with properly designed stuff...

According to Stereophile, one Ipod compared quite favorably to CD players when using lossless compression. http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/

You do realize that the "sound chip" in an iPod is ridiculously good, right? As in, it already is capable of better sound than most people will ever have the capability of appreciating, because of how it's used.

Even Sterophile -- and these are the guys who claim that they can hear the difference between various power cables plugged into their amplifiers -- thought it was good. [1] At least when it's playing AIFF files; MP3s throw away too much information to really ever sound good to people listening for that level of quality anyway. Their conclusion [2] was "The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance."

I agree with your point in general, but I think you used a bad example. Digital music players in general, and the iPod in particular (since it's the most common device in that category) have a rather large surplus of "quality," that most people never use. Either because they are using it to play back garbagy material that's encoded at 128kb/s, or listening using crummy earbuds, or in a noisy environment, or all three. Virtually no one actually uses the capabilities that most devices actually have; a "premium iPod" with some sort of super-high-end decoder would just be a status symbol: make it in a different exterior color and 50% higher price and people would buy it just so they can show their friends, but they'd never use the additional capabilities. That's what really drives sales of "premium" consumer stuff, it's not the quality per se, it's the cachet.

I could think of a few other markets where this same situation is also true (the quality of even the lowest-common-denominator device is greatly in excess of the quality actually experienced by most people that own it). So when you look at small brands that are catering to a "quality" market, it's important to look closely and see whether they're actually delivering quality, or are just selling an image. It's quite often the latter.

[1] http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index.html
[2] http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index5.html

You do realize that the "sound chip" in an iPod is ridiculously good, right? As in, it already is capable of better sound than most people will ever have the capability of appreciating, because of how it's used.

Even Sterophile -- and these are the guys who claim that they can hear the difference between various power cables plugged into their amplifiers -- thought it was good. [1] At least when it's playing AIFF files; MP3s throw away too much information to really ever sound good to people listening for that level of quality anyway. Their conclusion [2] was "The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance."

I agree with your point in general, but I think you used a bad example. Digital music players in general, and the iPod in particular (since it's the most common device in that category) have a rather large surplus of "quality," that most people never use. Either because they are using it to play back garbagy material that's encoded at 128kb/s, or listening using crummy earbuds, or in a noisy environment, or all three. Virtually no one actually uses the capabilities that most devices actually have; a "premium iPod" with some sort of super-high-end decoder would just be a status symbol: make it in a different exterior color and 50% higher price and people would buy it just so they can show their friends, but they'd never use the additional capabilities. That's what really drives sales of "premium" consumer stuff, it's not the quality per se, it's the cachet.

I could think of a few other markets where this same situation is also true (the quality of even the lowest-common-denominator device is greatly in excess of the quality actually experienced by most people that own it). So when you look at small brands that are catering to a "quality" market, it's important to look closely and see whether they're actually delivering quality, or are just selling an image. It's quite often the latter.

[1] http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index.html
[2] http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index5.html

While your mileage may of course vary, as the saying goes, Stereophile Magazine has done at least one review of the iPod, and regardless of what you think of Stereophile and that segment of the audio market, one has to give them credit for being pretty thorough in reviews. They hooked it up to some very high end listening gear, plus a battery of electronic test equipment, and seemed very impressed by the quality when it wasn't being compressed. If anyone is getting mediocre audio quality out of theirs, then I would seriously look into the encoding they were using. I know that for playing straight AIFFs and Apple Lossless files, my 3G iPod sounds better (ever so slightly) than the headphone output of my Mac. I'm not sure whether it's just the lack of electronic noise or what, but it's there. And it's better than any other portable music device I've heard.

Stereophile's review of the 3G iPod 10/2003
More quantitative analysis of the 3G

Personally, I have a 3G, and I listen to it almost exclusively through a set of Grado SR80s (32-ohm cans, which some people will tell you are less than optimal for iPod use) and have been nothing but impressed with it. I've never A/Bed it versus a 4G or 5G though, so I can't say that Apple didn't cut some corners in the new ones. It's no secret that the general public doesn't give a damn about audio quality past the point where you can identify what's playing, so it wouldn't be totally surprising (although sad) if they did.

The review is at http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index.html.

"The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance. But if you're willing to trade off maximum playing time against the ability to play uncompressed AIFF or WAV files, the iPod will do an excellent job of decoding them. Excellent, cost-effective audio engineering from an unexpected source.--John Atkinson"

Except that they could go higher than CDDA. Significantly higher, assuming that they have access to the master tapes made during mastering -- which are probably at a much higher bitrate than 44.1k/16bit.

MP3 is capable of delivering better sound quality than CD, if you use really high bitrates and provide it with appropriate source material. Of course it rarely ever does, and in most cases people don't care enough about quality to even give it a high enough rate to come near uncompressed 44.1/16, but that doesn't mean that the format isn't capable of it.

I remember reading that the iPod (an older version anyway) maxes out at 16 bits at 48kHz, although it has the decoding power to do higher definition stuff. In fact I bet the newer versions could probably have enough processing power to do DSD-type formats like SACD used.

It probably won't happen for a long time though, because there's limited consumer demand (however it is there, and it's not as much of a niche market as you'd think) coupled with an unwillingness by the music companies to sell high-def audio recordings that aren't horribly encumbered by DRM, which drives away potential customers and helps further the first problem.

Why yes! Mounting your turntable on a isolation platform will improve your sound

Stereophile did a review of the last generation (prior to clickwheel) in 2003. Here's the link: http://www.stereophile.com/budgetcomponents/934/in dex.html They thought well of it.

http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index5.html

But what would Stereophile and their testing equipment know?

See http://www.stereophile.com/budgetcomponents/934/in dex.html for a full audiophile level review, complete with measurements

Sorry about that.

http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index5.html

And note that these tests were though the headphone jack, since the original iPod had no line out.

Stereophile, a high-end audio magazine, has done a complete test of the iPod, including sound quality issues. They didn't compare it to other portable players, though.

http://stereophile.com/mediaservers/934/

From http://www.stereophile.com/news/082205riaa/ ...

In the war against copyright infringement, organizations like the RIAA and MPAA have taken to characterizing the major culprit as organized crime, pointing to parallels with the traffic in illegal narcotics. "The markup for a kilo of heroin is 200%," claimed Warner Music spokesman Craig Hoffman. "The markup for pirated CDs and DVDs is 800%."

I wonder what the markup is on commercially produced CDs and DVDs ... 8000% ??

Such ... irony ... the recording industry complaining about the high price of pirated content ... cannot ... suppress ... gales of laughter ...

From http://www.stereophile.com/news/082205riaa/ ...

In the war against copyright infringement, organizations like the RIAA and MPAA have taken to characterizing the major culprit as organized crime, pointing to parallels with the traffic in illegal narcotics. "The markup for a kilo of heroin is 200%," claimed Warner Music spokesman Craig Hoffman. "The markup for pirated CDs and DVDs is 800%."

I wonder what the markup is on commercially produced CDs and DVDs ... 8000% ??

Such ... irony ... the recording industry complaining about the high price of pirated content ... cannot ... suppress ... gales of laughter ...

One instance of Sony "paying lip service to piracy"?

Sony BMG DRM Strives to Eliminate "Schoolyard Piracy"

Gotta love them audiophiles. :-)

Of course there are differences between good and bad SPDIF outputs (good and bad systems with SPDIF outputs to be precise). The impedance, the connectors, the regularity of the data output, the jitter... suposing the system won't resample the datas.
Concerning your computer, I don't think it would have any problem in forwarding data at the right rate.
Avoid too much cpu-intensive tasks when listening your music.

People talk about jitter and it's interesting because it mainly affects only the end segment, the DAC, because before it you can do all the crap you want.
If you remember to have a good DAC that will just put the data back to normal (I mean jitter-less).

An amazing analysis can be found here (not so far from your setup) Apple AirPort Express Wi-Fi Hub-D/A processor.
This guy uses a "bad" setup ending in 0% (yes, 0) data lost. And with a reclocking DAC with less jitter than a multi-thousands $ system.

I may recommend you the Mini-Dac if it's in your budget (not so expensive for high-end systems, but expensive compared to $99 stuff).

He never received any royalties. At first he just figured his recordings weren't selling (that's what they told him--how should he know any different--they do all the bookkeeping and tracking of sales!). Later he found out his recordings were indeed selling like hotcakes and he should have been receiving substantial royalty payments every quarter.

Despite repeated promises from Dorian to get the situation resolved "real soon now", he never did receive a nickel, and it turns out that (according to him) just not paying royalties at all was essentially Dorian's policy. While all their big name recording artists (in the classical music world) were wondering where their royalty checks were, the company principals were busy building & buying million dollar homes in various exotic locations around the world . . .

According to my friend, this sort of treatment is more or less the norm in the recording industry. They give you sales records that you strongly suspect are doctored or just plain wrong (but how do you prove it?), pay you royalties 1/10 or 1/4 what you have good reason to believe you should be getting (again, how do you prove it?), pay you occasionally instead of quarterly (per the contracdt), or just "forget" to pay you altogether until you pester them repeatedly, then pay some small amount to keep you quiet.

He says that as near as he can tell, Dorian really didn't know how much they owed people. But of course there is a BIG reward to them for being so incompetent . . . if they were organized and competent they would have to fork over the royalties. But with "gosh, we're so disorganized around here!" and a stupid grin, it all works out for the best . . . for them.

See Dorian's web site and some articles about their bankruptcy: 1 2 3.

Incidentally, the same friend says that music royalties are indeed his largest single source of income. But--royalties from sheet music, music books, and music-related books, NOT recordings.

Why link to April Fools jokes, when the real thing is so rediculous? They're mad, I tells ya, mad!

Why link to April Fools jokes, when the real thing is so rediculous? They're mad, I tells ya, mad!