Bits Are Bits, Right?

"Bits are bits and as long as the CD player can read them, the accuracy of the spacing doesn’t matter because everything is thrown into a buffer which removes the effect of any jitter written into the data during burning." I know I don’t agree with that logic, but for the life of me I can’t remember the technical reasons.

Could be what you forgot is its wrong. Bits are indeed bits, but the pits and land aren’t bits at all. Each is a word comprised of a whole string of bits, with the length of the pit and the breadth of the land being what determines the string of bits. So it is a time function and anything, including a lot of things GK clowns around about, can mess with the bits and thereby the sound. CD is in other words not digital in the sense almost everyone imagines, but analog. Only CD is analog with a whole lot of noisy circuits and whatnot in the path. So technically even worse than analog. If such a thing even is possible. Which CD proves every day that it is.

Perfect sound forever! Technophilia uber alles!

Yes, digital only exists as a mathematical concept. All of reality is analog (at least the reality we deal with - at the scale of Planck time and Planck lengths things may be different). A stream of “digital” data is an analog signal that a computer has to interpret as a 1 or a 0 by deciding when the value has changed enough and at what time to be interpreted as a different bit.

One of the ways I know that what happens before the data buffer matters is the difference in sound quality between streaming and reading a local file. I have always thought the local file sounds better than streaming even though it’s the exact same data. Just recently, I was driving down the road with a friend when they plugged the phone into the car and the sound quality was much better than usual. I asked what they did, and I found out they were playing songs off the phone’s “hard drive,” whereas I am usually streaming from Tidal. Same data, way different sound.

Almost all this goes away with the use of a modern DAC. :)

Just recently, I was driving down the road with a friend when they plugged the phone into the car and the sound quality was much better than usual. I asked what they did, and I found out they were playing songs off the phone’s “hard drive,” whereas I am usually streaming from Tidal.

Yeah. What I thought. Crap so bad you can tell its crap even in a car. And there’s guys come on here, what’s the best $5k speaker/amp/cable/whatever to pipe my Tidal crap through? So it doesn’t sound quite so crappy, I guess. Or hear exactly how  Then there’s guys try and pretend this can all be magically solved with a DAC or whatever. Right. As if.

Yep, I love Tidal but I don’t stream in my audio system. It’s nice to have when guests come over so they can play whatever song they want to hear but for me, it’s physical media or nothing. Now maybe things can be improved with a high quality reclocker or some other technology like asynchronous DACs, but I’ve long noticed that even when streaming through my DAC sounds good, it sounds even better from a CD.