Dr Bunsen Honeydew wrote:Well the digital interconnect between transport and DAC makes a lot of difference and that I presume is sending digital parcels.
Aha, not at all. Digital audio went into production when digital was still quite young and most of the electronic components involved was still at the very limit of their capability. The disc is read, error correction(if there is not too much disc damage for the data redundancy) or error concealment (which is used where there is not enough data redundancy for correction - this is audible to obvious, depending on the nature of the errors) applied then sent as a continuous digital stream down the SPDIF link. The timing of the DAC is locked to the timing of this data stream. Whilst data is not likely to be lost there are potentially timing and reflection issues which can be effected by the link, including the cable.
Recently increasing numbers of DAC units have a buffer memory at the input which allows them to collect the data and re-clock it to the DAC. In the absence of earthing problems I would expect this to be cable transparent.
Data sent over CAT 5 is robust and if there are earthing or timing issues it is down to poor component design.
I can't think of any mechanism by which such a data cable could, in itself, effect sound quality.
I too have not heard a difference between NAS stored or on TFS stored files, but that could be expectation bias too
Frank