Originally Posted by Andrew_WOT
Now I am confused, did you mean distortion or flavor.
Your original post says
BTW, what distortion gets translated to in reference to bit-by-bit data stream? Are we talking about jitter here, does it actually flavor the sound? Digital receiver still receives same bits, the timing may be off but still the same exact data.
USB receiver and USB/SPDIF implementation can make a world of difference even for 16/48.
I was using "flavor" as an euphemistic way of saying distortion/jitter/etc. At the end of the day the user would have to compare side by side to decide if something sounds better or not. Even if it sounds better the user would have to decide if the additional cost is justified by the improvements heard.