Creating ultimate signal path for Qobuz

[krass]

On 11/30/2022 at 2:35 PM, Cebolla said:

Your reply to Davide's post appeared to be unaware that Qobuz delivers files as files too ("buy all files you want to listen to"). 

 

I’m no expert but AFAIK Qobuz streaming (& any streaming service) does NOT stream a SINGLE FLAC (or other) type file, so is not an identical file to a FLAC (or other) track that is downloaded.

 

Streaming will use a streaming protocol* that allows the endpoint to communicate with the streaming server. The streaming server will deliver short segments of music, typically 2-10 seconds, where each segment is a complete file for the purposes of the streaming protocol. The endpoint performs some buffering, and the task of unwrapping the segment files and joining them together. Streaming therefore delivers MANY complete files (FLAC or whatever) to build up the single music track. You would therefore never be able to buy the individual streaming files; you buy the much bigger, longer track files.

 

This explains why you can still listen to a FLAC stream, that is interrupted mid song…. since the remaining small segment files will not yet have been sent to & buffered by the endpoint. 

And FLAC is a wrapper/ protocol too, at the next level. Once the endpoint unwraps each FLAC segment, joins together with the previous one, then I suppose it could theoretically be identical musical bit content as the entire song file. But I doubt that at any point the same files exist at the level of digital files being transferred over TCP/ RTSP/RTP or whatever….

 

So long as the reconstructed music data is sufficiently buffered and reclocked to the same highest level, then I see no reason why a music stream should sound any better or worse than the corresponding song file stored locally. After all, when you play a local file you’re just “streaming” it from your SSD or whatever using a computer disk/ bus protocol, with buffers etc… 

 

As I say, I’m no expert but this is my base understanding……

 

*) There are different streaming protocols, all with different performance/ cost/ complexity/ benefit / compatibility