You have too much network bandwidth!!


As I was fiddling around with my Roon streamer, putting the finishing touches on the network configuration I started monitoring the network throughput of the end point. With a stereo 196 kHz/32 bit audio signal it uses about 1.5 Mbits/second of bandwidth.  

This means a typical 1 GigE could support about 70 simultaneous high resolution audio streams.  Even an old-school 100 Mbit network could handle 9 of them. 

My point really is just that chances are good your home network already has much more bandwidth than you need for high resolution audio. 

erik_squires

I have 14 4K TVs and I can stream them all at the same time with my 1Gig streaming service. Audio takes nothing compared to video we’ll be fine.

@tomrk Be sure to consult these HQP discussion groups for help and guidance:

HQ Player - Head-Fi

HQ Player - Audiophile Style

 

EDIT: Yes, HQP can convert DSD to PCM, although I've not have a reason to do it, so I cannot comment.

There’s 4K TV and then there’s 4K streamed TV.

All digital TV is compressed using lossy algorithms historically devised by the Motion Picture Experts Group also known as MPEG.  MPEG sought compression techniques from the industry, and combined the best to produce compression standards, the best known being MPEG 3 and MPEG 4.  Within each standard, the producer of an mpeg file or stream can choose the degree of compression, and hence loss of quality.

I asked ChatGPT:  here are some vital statistics which I have re-written ;-).

Blu-ray 4K typically outputs between 92 and 144 Mbps.  Audio is lossless.

Netflix 4K is highly compressed down to 16 Mbps with many visible artifacts.  Audio is lossily compressed, even Dolby Atmos.

For further comparison, a Super Audio Compact Disk SACD 5.1 recording outputs DSD at about 2.8 x 6 = 16.8 Mbps.  This is more than Netflix uses for both sound and video in order to get the Netflix streaming bit rate manageable!

But wait, there’s more.

A Pure Audio Blu-ray with 9 tracks of 192-kHz 24-bit PCM outputs about 43.2 Mbps

Finally, you can convert DSD to PCM but there is a loss of detailed timing information.  PCM can be converted to DSD losslessly

 

@tomrk 

That is objectively true, but on a typical modern CPU or streaming device, the time taken to decode a level 8 FLAC file (highest level) can be considered to be negligible and often falls within milliseconds

I agree, but I don't think your comment has any bearing on the topic of bit-rates!

All digital content is buffered in multiple places during consumption.  If streaming, there is a trade-off between latency and accuracy.  Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a use-case where latency should be minimised if you want to have a conversation in real-time, whereas high resolution audio should favour accuracy and if it takes a few seconds to start, who cares?.