1s are 1s, 0s are 0s, right?

Eldatford, yes, I was thinking about jitter. Yes, if everything works perfectly, but, even in a self diagnosing system things don't always work out perfectly.

I am quite happly with my system's audio quality and I don't feel the urge to spent $6000 or so to find out if an esoteric player would sound better. (I have other interests to spend money on).

It's true that my experience with digital communications is in the context of very high-tech military equipment (missile guidance systems) and the techniques that we use may not always be utilized in audio equipment, although I can't see why not since the cost of doing things right would not be great.

In summary, to address the wrong ideas that I hear most often...

digital pulse distortion, be it pulse shape due to line reflections, or timing (jitter) should have no effect.

Error correction is not bad. The purpose of error correction is not to correct errors. It is to permit higher bandwidth communications by operating the hardware so fast that (correctable) errors do occur. You give away, say 50%, of your bandwidth to redundancy, so that you can run, say 5 times, faster.

D/A non-monotonicity would cause audible distortion, but I am not aware of this being a problem with modern electronics.

Eldatford, I didn't mean to suggest relative value and how you should spend your money.

A digital signal is still a signal, that is, a time-variable voltage/current presence on the wires. I think here is an important distinction: If the device interpreting the signal treats it as just a sequence of data-bits, buffers it, and then creates an analog signal based on its own internal clock, then sure, 1s will be 1s and 0s will be 0s. But if the time variation of the original signal has an effect on how the device responds, the that signal is essentially sending extra analog information to it as well.

[email protected].