(...) Furthermore, I lost my "audiophile card" long ago when I started listening to 2 channel music up-mixed with AuroMatic or DTS:Neural-X !!!
Can you elucidate ignorant people as me how this affects 2 channel listening?
(...) Furthermore, I lost my "audiophile card" long ago when I started listening to 2 channel music up-mixed with AuroMatic or DTS:Neural-X !!!
Close. Lots of changes to the server since then. It is entirely possible that many of the newer transports would shift our decision. But at this point, it would not be enough to cancel out all of the upsides of the server approach that I have grown accustomed to (and spoiled by!!).
One word: Noise.
Digital is extremely susceptible to noise, and computers/servers have their noise problems. Not that they cannot be overcome, but success apparently does not come automatically.
(There may be other issues, but this strikes me as the potential main contender.)
There are indeed upsides of convenience to the server approach. Also, if my habits of listening to music were such that they would greatly benefit from a Tidal subscription, a server would be a no-brainer for me, regardless of sound quality.
If I were to go the server route, I'd probably choose Baetis with their AES/EBU output. I assume that their better models might match or even exceed the sound quality of my CD transport on 16/44.1 files. In that case, the extra expenditure might be worthwhile. Yet currently I have bigger fish to fry than that when it comes to system upgrades.
Unfortunately just one word can be largely insufficient and ambiguous. If addressing electrical noise, noise is a random fluctuation in an electrical signal - but the critical point in the transmission seems to be the correlation between sources of non random or pseudo-random spurious signals in digital systems and the subjective sound quality.
This subject is not easy do debate technically - we must be prepared to listen to experts who tell us that digital is very robust and experts who tell us that digital is extremely fragile - and both are right!
Mine has both AES/EBU and SP/DIF outputs as well.
Can you elucidate ignorant people as me how this affects 2 channel listening?
..even if a transport were a tiny bit better, I would still use a server - and now Tidal on a reasonably good streamer. The convenience factor, the ability to listen to music I might never hear (Tidal), the ability to quickly move from one album to the next, etc would (and has) become my defacto listening methodology.
This subject is not easy do debate technically - we must be prepared to listen to experts who tell us that digital is very robust and experts who tell us that digital is extremely fragile - and both are right!
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