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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

"network rendering, streamers, music servers, mini computers"

I believe there are different protocols involved. The bits sent over the Ethernet are not the same. Protocols designed for use over a local area network on dedicated links can be considerably simpler and more efficient than those that must run over arbitrary networks including the Internet. This impacts the processing that is located close to the DAC and hence, potentially the sound. Unfortunately, in both cases, as with USB, there is still a lot of processing, something that requires a considerable amount of computing power and the likely noise.

Most product terminology is created for marketing purposes. A classic example is "Direct Stream Digital" which is nothing but 2822.4/1 PCM rather than 44.1/16 PCM. Of course when one looks at the format this way one immediately sees DSD has high sampling rate (good) and DSD has low bit depth (bad) and hence one expects there to be tradeoffs, as in fact there are. This is all about creating market niches, publicity and in some cases cults.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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