analogmusic posted:
I’m wondering the same. Is the output of various streamers bit perfect ?
What do you think that bit perfect means in this context? And which devices can be bit perfect? I understand bit perfectness to be a property of transports, not of streamers.
analogmusic posted:
for instance the auralic Aries has 4 filter settings so is the data changed by these 4 filters ?
I understand that a device that does upsampling (possibly followed by filtering) cannot be bit perfect.
analogmusic posted:
chord do insist that no software should change the data to get the best out of the DACs
or at least the streamer should give the option of a bit perfect I.e no change to the original source data.
It is easy to setup transports like MPD not to change the sampling rate or the bit depth. Does this mean that they are bit perfect? The only way to assess that the stream of bits that reaches a DAC is identical to an original file is to keep a copy of that file on the DAC. Very few devices offer definite bit perfectness tests. But, in principle, bit perfectness is a well defined notion and it is easy to test.
analogmusic posted:
Simon I’m sorry but I’m not able to understand the advantages of ndx2 over nd5xs 2 when used purely as a transport ?
I am not Simon and I do not have any first hand experince with NDX2 and ND5XS 2 but I can imagine many reasons why a device could be better than the other. Two transports can be both bit perfect and yet generate outgoing streams with very different jitter figures. Apart from jitter, different devices can generate different levels of electromagnetic noise. But it is possible that NDX2 and ND5XS 2 are in fact not so different as transports, they are finally based on the same streaming platform.
