This is indeed a fascinating topic, and overall I tend to agree with Antoine's statement that there are phenomena that influence digital sound quality that are not well understood. It is a curious business, the entire western world (and much of the rest of the world) is using digital technology in a range of areas to vast to list, and it pretty much all works exactly as science would predict. Then we have the computer audio world, which appears to have many theories, very little consensus regarding these theories, and hard science and testing of theories tends to lead to more debate rather than providing firm evidence leading to conclusions. Consider that many of us are happy to download music and store it on a hard drive. I am sure two people in the world could do this using different computers, networks, and so on. Compare the two files and they would be identical. In the domestic environment, this could be sent over a network and buffered and exist in temporary memory local to the DAC, how could anything upstream of this make any difference whatsoever? We have sent probes to Pluto, discovered the Higgs Boson particle, built functioning quantum computers, but computer audio still confounds us on quite a fundamental level. Puzzling, but fascinating nevertheless. Consider the Higgs Boson particle was discovered in part using computer equipment just a prone to noise and jitter as anything in the hifi world. Maybe the Devialet hardware designers armed with their oscilloscopes are smarter than we think and they will crack the whole thing with the new streamer board! 
(or maybe not, and the software will probably ruin it anyway, but you never know) 
I have to be blunt here, but an awful lot of what I read on this subject just does not stand up to logical scrutiny, in addition, a lot of stuff I read does show clear signs of people falling victim to expectation bias, confirmation bias, placebo effect and so on, to me it is plain to see in very many cases. This stuff exists and is very real. However, I am not saying that this explains everything, in some cases their is a consistent body of evidence to suggest that something is going on, which would indeed appear to be a phenomenon that is not yet widely understood or accepted. Unfortunately the phycology of this game and endless pseudo science from some of the people that play this game can create a very obstructive fog to finding and understanding these key phenomena.
My view on this is that we need vastly better methods of testing this stuff. To put this simplistically, we need some kind of test equipment that analyse what matters to a higher resolution than the human ear can detect. There is the old mantra, 'not everything that can be measured matters, not everything that matter can be measured.' (a twist on a Einstein quote, I believe) My view is that in audio and with 21st Century technology it should be possible to measure everything that matters, and more. The Hubble telescope does a better job of seeing things than the human eye, by some margin in fact. OK, the Hubble telescope is an expensive bit of kit, but the same is true of a pair of binoculars. So why not come up with something that can hear better than the human ear? The guys with oscilloscopes do not seam to be able to resolve this one, I think we need something new. Wouldn't it be great to have some kind of high resolution listening device that measured what matters? You could set it up on a system with three different USB widgets, and declare that widget A and B are doing nothing, but widget B is. That would be splendid I think. All we have to do now is invent such a device. Any ideas? Believe it or not, I have a few!
(or maybe not, and the software will probably ruin it anyway, but you never know) I have to be blunt here, but an awful lot of what I read on this subject just does not stand up to logical scrutiny, in addition, a lot of stuff I read does show clear signs of people falling victim to expectation bias, confirmation bias, placebo effect and so on, to me it is plain to see in very many cases. This stuff exists and is very real. However, I am not saying that this explains everything, in some cases their is a consistent body of evidence to suggest that something is going on, which would indeed appear to be a phenomenon that is not yet widely understood or accepted. Unfortunately the phycology of this game and endless pseudo science from some of the people that play this game can create a very obstructive fog to finding and understanding these key phenomena.
My view on this is that we need vastly better methods of testing this stuff. To put this simplistically, we need some kind of test equipment that analyse what matters to a higher resolution than the human ear can detect. There is the old mantra, 'not everything that can be measured matters, not everything that matter can be measured.' (a twist on a Einstein quote, I believe) My view is that in audio and with 21st Century technology it should be possible to measure everything that matters, and more. The Hubble telescope does a better job of seeing things than the human eye, by some margin in fact. OK, the Hubble telescope is an expensive bit of kit, but the same is true of a pair of binoculars. So why not come up with something that can hear better than the human ear? The guys with oscilloscopes do not seam to be able to resolve this one, I think we need something new. Wouldn't it be great to have some kind of high resolution listening device that measured what matters? You could set it up on a system with three different USB widgets, and declare that widget A and B are doing nothing, but widget B is. That would be splendid I think. All we have to do now is invent such a device. Any ideas? Believe it or not, I have a few!
1000 Pro - KEF Blade - iFi Zen Stream - Mutec REF10 - MC3+USB - Pro-Ject Signature 12
