I have been reading this forum, and have noticed a trend that straight off a CD player sounds better than downloaded into a hardrive or streaming.
The thing is bits are bits.
So what's the deal? Its it that the hard storage has to go through more networks to deliver the sound? hence whilst bit for bit perfect it may be, but there is more processing?
I get the purported issue with streaming - ie buffering/compression etc etc etc
I am a total luddite, and would not mind help on this. I say this as I am thinking about using a computer as a music storage/server
Ive asked myself that question a lot.
The best explanation ive come up with is that the scope trace of the digital signal of a cd player is very different to the output of a computer.
The old lampizator site has many examples of scope traces of cd player digital outputs. Audiocircle (empirical audio) has some of streamer/computer digital outputs.
The cd player digital outputs are generally very soft edged and smooth looking but quite far from really square. Computer outputs, on the other hand, look like squares but are overlayed with very high frequent noise.
Apparently, the source of this computer noise is both termic, switching and ringing inside the computer chips and its power supply — and its very hard to get rid of.
My bet is that this noise spills over to the dac and this somehow affects the dac’s ability to stack up the bits to something that approximates the original analogue signal.
This also correlates with the fact that software such as audirvana can actually improve the sq from servers quite a bit.
Such software reduces the general activity on the cpu — and thereby the noise.
Personally, i much prefer cd players to computers. A valved clocked and extensively modified marantz cd 94 is my best digital source.
I find that the digital source can be at least as important as the dac. In some ways, i find that the digital source to a large extent defines the “character” of the digital chain.
Jesper