Yesterday's post got me remembering there’s a myth out there that somehow bits from a CD or SACD are purer than bits from a stream. That if it came from a disc, it’s more “real.” I understand where it comes from. I remember ripping CDs for the first time—there was something better sounding from the disc.
Technically, that shouldn't have been true. Once you’ve got the data, it shouldn't matter how it got there. Whether it came off a shiny polycarbonate disc or was pulled from a server in Iowa, it’s the same 1s and 0s. Bits are bits.
Of course, that’s only half the story.
The journey those bits take—how they’re extracted, buffered, and timed—can absolutely affect what we hear. A CD transport reads the disc with a laser, buffers the data, and sends it out over a digital connection. A network streamer pulls the same data over Ethernet, stores it in memory, and outputs it the same way. Both paths can be perfect. Both can also be flawed.
What matters isn’t the origin—it’s the timing. It’s the clock.
When digital audio is played back, it has to be reassembled into an analog waveform. That process is incredibly sensitive to timing errors—what we call jitter. Jitter doesn’t corrupt the data. It corrupts the presentation. Spatial cues get smeared. Air and space disappear. Bass softens. Imaging goes fuzzy.
That’s why we obsess over reclocking, isolation, and buffering. A great DAC or streamer doesn’t just read bits. It rebuilds the musical intent behind them. It strips away the noise and aligns every packet so it arrives precisely when it should. Only then do the bits turn into music.
So no, streaming isn’t lesser than discs. And discs aren’t magically better than a well-managed network. It’s all just delivery. The real magic happens at the point of playback—when those bits meet the clock.
