High quality music

[Dr.]

Hello Jamming2004

The source is very important and everything in your signal path (hardware, software, firmware...)

Let's say the 24/96 music file arrives intact (after error correction...) at your router and you have an iPhone you used to request the song from your streaming service.

Let's also assume you play to the Phantoms via Bluetooth
The iPhone then compress the file to a lossy format and pass it to the Phantoms.

In this case, you lost all the sound quality from 24/96 down to 44.1/16 and then it was compressed to +/- 256kbps and your original file was +/-4608kbps and even with FLAC or ALAC compression the size would still be +/-2500kbps

In this example, you can easily see the amount of information passed to the phantoms is significantly different.

This leaves the Phantoms with the task to guess the information it did not receive and play what it hopes is close to what the artist intended.

As for the hardware in the signal path, it also matters significantly.

Let's just look at a small example.

If you have a music file that is 24/96 then your hardware needs to recreate an analog signal by reconstructing the signal 24bit by 24bit 96000 times a second for each channel.

Let's just assume you have a clock in your DAC that has some jitter > 50ms then the reconstruction of the analog signal will not match the signal that the artist recorded.

So the file may arrive or not arrive in time or intact but what you do with the file makes a huge difference in your listening experience. (if the listening experience matters to you)

I hope this provides some clarity.