I'm coming 'off the fence'

[thumb5]

USB and Ethernet have protocols to make sure the data is sent correctly.
...

Unfortunately for us "the data" that is sent correctly is designed for a machine to use and as you point out we're far from machines (or I could fix my computer with a placebo) so the data we hear can differ. The error correction helps computers receive the data sent, but we're still learning a lot about how to send sound digitally so that the human hearing the sound perceives the sound we're trying to transmit.

I would draw a distinction between how to "represent sound digitally so that the human hearing the sound perceives [it as intended]" and transmitting that digital representation from A to B.

Certainly there are plenty of different ways to approach the former and arguably we don't yet have a perfect method.  Yes, different methods of data representation may result in different heard experience for the listener.  But that's a very different discussion, isn't it?

More to the point, I think it's orthogonal to a discussion about digital data transmission.  The requirement there, as I see it, is that the receiver must be able to reconstruct the same bits that were sent from the transmitter, in a "timely enough" fashion depending on what the bit stream will be used for -- be that audio playback, rendering a web page, storing a file, etc.  The USB and Ethernet protocols Frank and I referred to are designed to solve that problem and indeed do so in the real world.