thanks for the reply.
to clarify what I meant by flawed:
What I had read is spdif is technically flawed because the clock signal is not transmitted independantly, but it is extracted from the data signal. Of course I could have easily misunderstood what I was reading.
As far as the sound quality, I had concluded that the ability to hear the effects of jitter is more aptly defined as subjective, as oppossed to obvious.
I think its great that your tests conclude you can not hear the difference, and thanks for mentioning it. Although I havent done any A/B tests, my gut feeling is that I wont hear any differences either, so I guess I am biased already
I think I will do a test of playing the same compact disk from 2 sources. One being computer-->spdif--reciever and the other test dvdPlayer-->hdmi-->reciever and see if i notice a difference. probably will have to do a diff of the cd's to be sure they are bit identical
I have to wait for my Toshiba upconverting dvdplayer to get returned from warranty repair before I can do the test. The player had an interesting problem. After trying to play the latest crippled/bad sector/pseudo_enhanced_encryption/non_standard dvd's from blockbuster, the unit couldnt read *any* disks. Unplugging unit for 30+ seconds and restarting would fix problem, until similar disk was played again. The labor portion of my warranty had expired but Toshiba gracefully is going to repair/replace it at no charge. I think they were aware of the issue, because the nailed it immediately.
my original concern was that the audio chip on my computer kept the data in the digital format, so that the dac was not utilized. I was concerned because it appeared the mixing functions were done in analag. I have since noticed that the software mixer volume control has no affect on my spdif output, so I am assuming there is no dac conversion happening within the computer.
Thanks again for the post
Randy
