RCsquare

I should have made it clear that my question was related to the SW part of this. I do understand how the HW can skew things off, but also understood it as the DAC's job to fix that up (although it'd be best to minimize jitter before processing I guess). So thanks for sharing your perspective on this. Mark, thanks for sharing about the "bit perfect" light in Jriver. I've read of a way to check for Bit Perfect'ness using a DCS or AC3 file embedded into a wav file. I'm not sure I understand the background fully. But my experience with this process is not exactly as described in the page linked below. I do get white noise except with iTunes on Mac (setup for bit perfect output), when I get a short burst of white noise, followed by silence. I take it that this means that it's bit perfect, but I was expecting music ... not silence ... Any idea what's wrong there? Here's the link: http://code.google.com/p/cmediadrivers/wiki/Bitperfect

Hello, First post here ... looking for educational advice. I'm looking at upgrading our audio setup, beginning with the source. All our music is ALAC on a USB drive, attached to an older Windows XP laptop, feeding an Airtport Express (wireless). There I pick up the digital signal through SPDIF, into a DAC, an amp and then the speakers. I read quite a bit in those past days and it seems obvious that the first thing to do is to find another player to stream a bit perfect signal to the Airport Express, or possibly into the DAC directly. One way to achieve this is using iTunes/AirTunes with volume max'ed out: for 16bit/44.1 kHz the signal will be bit perfect. But what I can't figure out is that in some articles/posts the author seem to imply that there is something to be had beyond bit perfect ' ness. What am I missing here? I don't understand what more there is to be had from a player then to have a bit perfect digital signal. I can possibly understand the concern with imperfect ripping, but that's before getting the music to the player. Any pointer/help would be appreciated. RCsquare