CAJames
Seasoned Member
"I've run every red light on memory lane."
Posts: 1743
|
Here's my thing (and full discloser, networking was my day job for many years).
People think loading a website and playing digital music are the same thing: that bits is bits. But clearly the are not. When you are doing something like loading a website both the input and the output are bits, and it this case bits really are bits. And if some of the bits get delayed or corrupted the computer is perfectly happy to wait until they are correct, because (mostly) a computer doesn't care about time.
But when you are playing digital music bits are really an analog representation of a square wave that is propagated through an imperfect medium. The "digital" part of digital music is there is a specific voltage that marks the transition between 0 and 1, but what that voltage looks like after it has been through your cables and across your connectors and interacted with all the electro-magnetic noise in your vicinity can be very different from the cartoons we've seen of bits when they tell us bits is bits. And when exactly that transition from 0 to 1 occurs determines what the output musical wave form looks like. Or put another way time matters critically to digital audio.
So if you stop thinking about digital music as bits and start thinking about it as an analog signal, just like the rest of your system, things start to make a lot more sense. At least to me, YMMV of course.
|