In reply to:
Robert Harley Stereophile
Again - flowery prose aside about the struggle to find ying and yang between components, that elusive aural feng shui, audio nirvana... if face to face I'd like to reiterate to Mr. Harley that in the matter of digital datastreams, as we are discussing here, they exist in two states - correct and errored. On a redbook compact disc, there is stored digital waveform information. 44,100 times a second, the amplitude of a frequency is polled, turned into a number between 0 and (2^16-1) 65535. The job of a CD-P is to read these numbers, and pass them along as either a light pulse from a blinking LED (TOSlink) or as electric current pulse (SPDIF). If the stream of data matches, the signal is correct, if the stream of data does not match the source, the signal is incorrect.
As far as musicality/colouration/distortion goes - if the data stream is flawed (deviates from the data written on the CD) - I believe we all can agree that it was coloured by the CD-P. The objectivists would be absolutely correct in saying "yes, since the CD-P did not send the datastream verbatim, it has, in fact, coloured the sound" and not get an argument from any rational man.
If the CD-P sends the exact same data as is written on the CD, then no, even an objectivist would say "no, this component has not coloured this sound", but at the same time, this sound would match precisely the sound had the datastream come from computer memory, a cheap CD-P, punch cards, or any other source. Anyone that would argue that an identical bitstream from different sources would sound at all different is turning this into a faith-based religion and should wait for the next iteration of Hale-Bop, mix the Nembutal with the pudding and wash it down with a bottle of Smirnoff. Like Marshall Applewhite, I'm sure Mr. Harley would make the castration optional.
Bren R.
