I really like that that quote from Russell, I consider myself somewhat an amateur philosopher, but I'm more of an Aquinas guy.... What I do professionally is software development, for 10 years now. Among other things, I work on networking protocols and transports. There are several ways to get bits from point A to point B in my world, token ring, ethernet, infiniband,etc.. These all provide different QOS and use different hardware but from the high level application perspective it sees the same bits regardless of how they get there. In our example the receiver/DAC receives the same bits regardless of what is sending it. In the digital world bits are bit, there is absolutely no subjective aspect to this. It is provable that the bits sent are the same as the bits received.
All that said, I'd be open to hearing *evidence* that perhaps the DAC is sensitive to the something like the rate of date coming in which produces the analog. Further I'm wondering how this corresponds to the original recording especially considering when speaking in terms of compressed files.
Thanks for the help!
