Network Dropouts

[Mike48]

(21-07-2014 20:07)magister Wrote:  [...]Paul McGowan, the CEO of PSA who is very honest in his discussions on the forum, said that nothing in streaming is easy and that making the new Bridge play gapless reliably even at single-rate DSD has been a difficult engineering challenge.[...]

Clearly, audio is sensitive to network latency in a way that many other applications (e.g. Web browsing) aren't. Still, I imagine it's not the only field in which latency is a problem, and audio has the advantage that sufficient buffering can solve everything, or just about. (In contrast, that might not be the case in some real-time control problems.)

It seems to me that the engineering needed in audio is not terribly exotic, but it's not what audio manufacturers are used to. Big companies like Sony can hire the expertise they need. Some high-end outfits seem to be trying to do it in house, perhaps by trial and error, with bad results for their customers. It is, in the end, the customers who are left holding the bag.

Regarding Paul McGowan's comment on the difficulties of streaming high-rate audio: It seems to me that the extreme data rates starting to be pushed in audio may be overkill, a case of throwing resources at a problem, rather than analyzing it fully. That's my speculation. Still, if PS Audio's new DAC (for example) makes CDs sound as wonderful as they say, why does anyone need quad-rate DSD?