Anything "audiophile" in the digital domain is all equally absurd. The only difference is that some require a half-second of consideration and others require literally no thought at all to identify as stupid.
I wouldn't go as far to say "anything", but certainly most. As long as a DAC with sufficient resolution and stable clock is being fed with enough bits, then yes.
If it’s all-digital and marketed to audiophiles, it’s a scam and/or absurd. You can’t improve upon bit-perfect. (Room calibration being a notable exception.)
You mean like those people, who argue, that: "Everything is a sequence of Zeroes and Ones, therefore the signal either gets transmitted or not!", while totally leaving out the fact, that this digital signal materializes in the real world via an analogous signal, which is electricity, and therefore each digital data transmission (as long as not optical) is submitted to physics that happen totally outside of the "digital domain"?
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Everything is ultimately subject to physics, including optical signals. Nobody claims otherwise.
But it is incorrect to say that digital transmissions must be at the mercy of physics. Digital transmissions can defy physics. There are numerous techniques which ensure that a signal reaches the destination with precisely zero flipped bits and exact timing. And even when the signal has no integrity mechanisms, in practice the error rate will be low enough to never matter in practice.
And you know what, even if bits were getting flipped and jitter was extreme, you still wouldn't have signal degradation in the ways described by audiophiles; you would get a raised noise floor. Random error is noise. Noise is random error.
Of course this is never an issue. We can send digital signals that are millions of times more complex than digital audio, with zero problems, using equipment that is insanely cheap. The assertion that the extremely low data rate PCM audio signals have some special risk associated with them is delusional.
> I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Everything is ultimately subject to physics, including optical signals. Nobody claims otherwise.
Sorry, I misformulated my sentence.
It should have read (emphasizing what I left out from the sentence in my previous post):
> You mean like those people, who argue, that: “Everything is a sequence of Zeroes and Ones, therefore the signal either gets transmitted or not!”, while totally leaving out the fact, that this digital signal materializes in the real world via an analogous signal, which is electricity, and therefore each digital data transmission (as long as not optical) is submitted to the physics of electricity, that happen totally outside of the "digital
domain"?
Though, I think you are nitpicking, because, from the rest, it should be totally obvious, what I wanted to say. Use the error correction, man ;-)
Therefore:
If an analogous signal's "success" can suffer from the material, through which it travels, then a digital signal will suffer for the same reasons, simply, because it is not a digital signal, but, materialistically, both signals are of the same sort.
Even if we could create the perfect mathematical concept in our brain and have a solution for anything, as soon as we step into the real world, that is, the material side of affairs, many unexpected things can happen, that have to be accounted for at the next time.
Are you referring to noise being transferred to the analog stage, or digital data transmissions being corrupted?
The latter is very unlikely with asynchronous USB DACs since USB will retransmit corrupted packets, and jitter isn't a concern since the DAC buffers then uses it's own clock.
The former, well yeah, it's impossible to completely eliminate RFI no matter what you do, short of optically isolating the source, putting the analog equipment in a faraday cage, and running it all off of batteries.