You are absolutely correct. RAID is redundancy but not backup (unless configured for speed only - then it isn’t even redundancy).
A backup plan is like a spare tire for the car. You dont need one until you need one and if you dont have one you are dead in the water.
Now that collectively most or all of our info is stored digitally somewhere a backup plan is essential. I still refuse to use cloud storage services but really dont have a specific reason except any system like that can be hacked and will be hacked sooner or later.
Having a few hard disc crashes in my day I can speak from experience. The other thing about backups is you need to make sure they are happening as expected.
It is very easy to “set it and forget it” and then find out months later that a glitch in the chain caused the backup procedure to stop.
Thank you Anup, I think I understand your point, but I don’t think I’m explaining mine very well.
A digitally encoded wave form has only two dimensions, frequency and amplitude and clocking is only a factor at two points, ADC and DAC. I get that. But that is only taking account of what is going on at the logical level, i.e. the symbolic representation of ones and zeroes. That is what I mean by “theoretical”. You assert that there can be no possible difference because there is none that is explained by your conceptual model (digital audio) and you believe that model to be complete.
Servers and DACs are however electrical devices that exhibit behaviour that can’t be measured or explained within the conceptual realm of that symbolic representation, i.e. with digital theory.
So I know what we can measure, and we measure things that we know are relevant according to our conceptual model. But just like my analogy with quarks, we don’t measure things we don’t know about yet. One example would be leakage currents, people didn’t think to measure them in packet networks because they lay outside the conceptual model of digital (and yes, I know about transformer decoupling).
I am not saying that there are sources of noise or distortion that can be passed along with a bit perfect stream in a packet based network, just that there might be. Whenever you connect electrical devices together they interact electrically, regardless of whether they “identify” as digital or analog.
I know am unlikely to convince you, if for no other reason than that I am far from convinced myself. But I am leaving the door open in order to avoid making the standard audiophile mistake of thinking my knowledge is complete.
wow I’m still laughing. Seriously - is this thing UL or CE certified? the whole concept aside for the moment… Judging from the pictures there is some questionable thermal engineering. If those CPUs are indeed a pair of Xeon Scalables, it is unlikely the PSU and cooling is adequate to run full throttle. By comparison, the image below is how one workstation manufacturer deals with cooling of Xeon scalable processors. These processors by the way are designed for high performance compute workloads, not serving audio.
Look at it this way; I’m sure you’ve experienced pulling down a file via a Web browser. Do you expect the file to be in error when received?
No, of course not, because you understand that the bits are transmitted from the Web Server in packets of data across thousands of miles of the Internet and received on your PC with integrity checks and error correction to ensure that the packets are re-assembled back into the file as an exact replica of the original thousands of miles away.
Do you even care how powerful or not that Server is in order to receive the file error free? No, of course not.
Well, guess what. Your UPnP/Roon Server sitting in your home sends files across your home network to the Rossini’s S800 Streaming board - an ARM-based Single-Board-Compute platform running Linux by the way - in EXACTLY the same way!
People seem to know that even a $50 Raspberry Pi can do the job of file transfers across the Internet perfectly error-free, but yet somehow when it comes to streaming Audio, all bets are suddenly off, and they need to refer to Quarks and Infinity stones.
Thank you Anup. You clearly think I am suffering some basic cognitive impairment and that may well be the case. It could also be the case that our conceptual model is complete and this entire product category is snake oil and all the people who claim they have heard differences are just suffering a massive dose of confirmation bias and wearing the emperor’s clothes. Wouldn’t be the first time in this great hobby of ours! Your arguments make sense (just as those who asserted that protons and neutrons were fundamental particles also did).
No, not at all. Sadly though, you appear to be not much different from many other Audiophiles who love to conflate legacy audio technology issues, with those of network based streaming.
By the way, may I remind you of your post from a few days ago;
(Your point about James’ “theoretical arguments” is amusing - you do realise dCS does actual R&D and test everything? It’s not “theoretical arguments”).
More importantly though, you should heed your own advise about empirical testing instead of invoking elementary-particle physics
I don’t know if I am provoking you Anup. If so I apologise because it is really not my intention. And I really don’t want to get into a hair-splitting contest as others here seem to love to do. But please stop speaking to me as if I were a 5-year-old.
Thank you for the reminder but I see nothing paradoxical in what I said. James presents a number of conceptual arguments about different PLL bandwidths and what sorts of jitter and drift they are and aren’t susceptible to. These may be, and probably are, based on a lot of empirical testing but he doesn’t go into any of that. So as presented this is a theoretical rationale about causal factors. I am interested in empirical observations about the effects (does it actually sound better?)
I am aware that dCS does actual R&D. I am also aware that they perform extensive empirical testing, both objective and subjective, precisely because they understand that our conceptual models may not be complete (we may not know all the relevant things to measure) and/or that while our measurement instruments may not have sufficient resolution to measure things that matter our ears do.
Unless you want to have the final word I suggest we leave it there.
With the greatest of respect to everyone here can I please just ask everyone to play nicely otherwise I’ll have to keep you all in at playtime and tell your parents when they come to collect you…
This is a wonderful hobby / addiction that we all have and we all have our own ways of enjoying it - I understand that in some places there are even still people that drag a needle across a piece of plastic!
As an attempt to interpose a “Look! Squirrel” moment have you seen this real-time Artemis re-entry video - it’s really quite something…
Speaking of physics (weren’t we?), please can we not regurgitate the digital bits-is-bits thing as if it’s all that’s going on? I’d be extremely disappointed if anyone here thought there was digital magic going on which might affect sound quality. in eg the timing or “shape” of the bits inside those ethernet frames/packets. I’m with @Anupc on this, there is simply no mechanism.
When we get into the bitstream (or whatever the post-streamer-conversion data is best called), it’s a different domain entirely. And too many people, including too many manufacturers, extrapolate from this domain to ethernet without really understanding why the extrapolation is invalid.
Having said that, we also know that in audio there is stuff (noise) going on too; in purely digital terms, the concept of any network switch doing anything sonically is complete nonsense, but in the real world then even a budget switch can make a clearly audible difference if installed say 0.5m of Cat cable from a streamer. The bits coming into and out of the switch are all present and correct, but the whole signal is still audibly better (in most systems in most rooms and to most ears etc etc, pick your own caveats).
If a Taiko thingie is touted as lower noise than a Taiko wotsit, fair play, there may be something going on which genuinely can affect sound quality. If any claims are focused on the purely ethernet side (including clocking, er, misunderstandings) then let’s call it for what it is.
While it’s all a bit of a confusing mess, it does seem this new Server has options for an internal DAC, which I suppose could potentially justify some of the costs, if done properly.
€86,200!!! (Sorry, not enough exclamation marks, I wore my keyboard out). Still, look at the intro discount, which will obviously tip the odd waverer over the line.
The trouble with internal DACs is… well, let’s just say it’s unlikely to be a dCS DAC
add on…just read at whats best hifi forum that Taiko is in discsussion with dCS (and Lampi) already…would be interesting to know what they’re talking about
For 80K I would start first with a Rossini+Clock or a (almost) Vivaldi+Clock+Upsampler.
Then…if you want…you can see what the additional 80 can provide you. Of course I would look to putting that 80k to different use - say a nice DarTZeel 8550 integrated + a pair of speakers…and most likely have some change left over
