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Ha! Fair enough. It’s just that nobody so far has talked about actually trying 2 or more different devices. Cue “I have and it’s bollocks”.
I’ll hopefully have a valve amplifier arriving this week to distract me from digital stuff.
Stevethecoffee-
It’s just that nobody so far has talked about actually trying 2 or more different devices
Err, I have and...
To be fair, it was two pretty expensive digital sources; a Wyred 4 Sound DAC and a Meridian 500 series CD player. Did extensive A/B with the CD and the FLAC rip of the CD. Had a friend over as well, who is a musician (not that means their hearing is any better).
We both concluded that it was impossible to distinguish between the sources.
Sold CD player, kept DAC. All CDs are now ripped to flac for home listening.
ChasnotRobert
John sounds like an idiot tbh. USB is a packetised, asynchronous digital signal - comparing it to things in the physical/analog/acoustic realm is not a serious angle. I’d be disinclined to pay any attention to anything he writes after that!
With regard to your previous points, dropped packets are possible, USB timing errors (that cause an effect) are less possible but both are not that likely with undamaged equipment. There’s also nothing to say that these errors only affect the subtleties of a track - you’re just as likely to get a massive pop or underwater garble as lose the detail from a reverb tail...