Critic's Corner

Posted by Dave_K (A) on March 24, 2017 at 14:56:01

In Reply to: RE: Really!..... posted by Isaak J. Garvey on March 19, 2017 at 17:57:45

Argh...
You would think your Chief Technology Officer would check with his engineers or just pull out a calculator before saying something stupid like that.

The raw bit rate of 24/96 PCM is 4608000/s (4.39 Mbps). If you figure about 40% savings from FLAC, the required bandwidth for lossless streaming of 24/96 is about 2.64 Mbps. Ancient old 802.11b wifi from circa 2000 sustains about 6-7 Mbps with a good signal, or half of that with a weak signal. So even the oldest wifi networks are no problem unless other users are loading the connection. These days, it's hard to find a wifi connection that isn't at least 802.11n (everything new is 802.11ac). 802.11b provides a real bandwidth of at least 20 Mbps with a weak signal, or more like 40-60 Mbps with a strong signal. So it's pretty ridiculous to claim wifi can't handle hi-res streaming.

A mobile phone from circa 2010 on an HSPA+ network could also handle a 2.64 Mbps stream with no problem. And these days, on AT&T 4G LTE, I can typically get 60-70 Mbps in most places. Bandwidth is just not a problem for streaming hi-res audio. Just look at all the people streaming 1080p video on their phones!