If the output is digital does the player make any difference to the so Options

[db579]

I'm wondering whether if you had two media playing pieces of hardware outputting digital music would the quality of the device make any difference? For example say you had a cheap-to-mid range android phone or mp3 player playing a flac file and outputting over HDMI to a receiver, and a higher spec digital media player like say the Olive 06HD playing the same flac file output over HDMI to a receiver would you hear/should there theoretically even be any difference in audio quality?

Thanks

[[JAZ]]

@ xnor: That example does not apply.

I do have high DPC latencies sometimes in my laptop with Windows 7 and integrated realtek soundcard. And obviously, those spikes do cause clicks and glitches to the audio.

So talking about DPC latencies to say that USB audio fails is just attributing a problem A to an unrelated subject B.

In this regard, and if we consider "Laptop with windows Vista/7/8" a "player", then, ok, we can say that the player matters to get glitch-free bit-perfect digital audio playback. Otherwise, i'm with the usual thinking that digital is digital.

[xnor]

I do have high DPC latencies sometimes in my laptop with Windows 7 and integrated realtek soundcard. And obviously, those spikes do cause clicks and glitches to the audio.

So talking about DPC latencies to say that USB audio fails is just attributing a problem A to an unrelated subject B.

My laptop also has onboard sound and it works perfectly fine without glitches even though the DPC latencies go consistently crazy with WLAN enabled. It's just the USB audio devices (have not tried async ones) I've had problems with, but only with high latencies. This is in no way unrelated.

What's unrelated is saying the hardware is broken when it's clearly a software (driver) problem.

This post has been edited by xnor: Aug 2 2012, 22:40