Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming External power supply for MC200

@Russ

You misunderstood my post.


I don't think my comments are unfair.

@Ronnie

In a hard wired network as Meridian recommend, both these should be a non issue. Add wireless, power line and routing, then things can be different. A well constructed wired network should be no less reliable than say a piece of coax running SPDIF between a transport and a DAC.

UDP offers many advantages compared to SPDIF and is more akin to running something like DD/DTS over coax but with the advantage that, if the application so required, it can be a bi directional communication so error control can be incorporated into the application.

Imho, the additional assured reliability of TCP is not required. Whilst TCP offers a closely coupled handshake and additional safeguards to handle lost or out of order packets and other bits, these can interfere dramatically with the timing of packets. IMHO, a very rare (should be non existant) lost packet that may even go unnoticed is probably less of an annoyance to the listener than having the system resync/buffer whilst a lost packet is recovered from. UDP also allows multicast broadcast for linking multiple zones which makes for far more efficient use of network than point to point connection that is needed with if using TCP - not that Sooloos is particularly heavy on the network if configured properly.

However, no matter which network solution is chosen, imho it's not going to be robust enough to pass a master clock signal needed for audio timing and therefor the audio stream is going to be clocked by the audio endpoint with exactly the same accuracy as if the audio endpoint was decoding a FLAC. There are huge benefits for this data being PCM based, leading to simplicity and optimisation of design of the audio endpoints. With less to do, there is less chance of them polluting the audio output. At the very least, it nullifies the FLAC vs WAV debate