What equipment do you use?

Holy Moly is that a stereo or the control centre for a Death Star?

All that gear to watch the Leafs stink every Saturday night! And I bet you after a few beers you forget how to work the remotes.

I have to admit that your diagrams have had me howling with laughter, not please understand in any derogatory sense, it´s just I´m a total audio ignoramous, and can´t even imagine what all that stuff does, but clearly you must be someone living the dream, and for that you have my total admiration.

I´m just imagining a similar set up in my place. I suppose my and the wife don´t really need a double bed, and we could put the loudspeakers in the bath, it´s only used occassionally. The neighbours kids are old enough to fly the nest I reckon so we could acquisition their bedrooms, and that should just about do it.

[EDITED BY MODS - no trading, please]

This may not be the best way to think about D-A conversion.  It depends on the amount of information available to recreate the original waveform (the complex "shape" of the original sound wave).

Think of it like an inkjet print.  This is composed of loads of dots.  The finer they are, and the more there are per inch, the closer it is to the original image.  This is analogous to bit-length and sampling frequency in digital audio.  Of course, there are subtleties (mainly psycho-acoustic, but usually with roots in the physics) and solutions (e.g. oversampling).  Thus, more is always better, and ultimately we are "fooled" into hearing something closely akin to the original waveform.  SACD always contains more information than CD and so should sound noticeably better, but interestingly I have not found this to be so in every case.  Similarly with, say, "Studio Quality" FLAC downloads from Linn Records.  Which just shows that it's more complex than it appears and that you can fool some of the people some of the time...

Either way, the digital "bit" is either there or it is not.  In fact, its "shape" is essentially irrelevant, which is why digital has such a high immunity to noise!

I wish you luck. My experience is the better your equipment, the more defects you find in your recordings. Talking about his electrostatic speakers, Peter Walker said it best - if you don't like the sound, you'd better take a look at the recording. Whenever my ESL63s have gone on the blink I've substituted my KEF 104s - far from shabby speakers themselves. Immediately I miss the transparency of the Quads, but the KEFs are far kinder to those strident 1980s DG recordings. Last time that happened I'd just bought the Chailly Mahler set and it sounded superb on the KEFs. Then I got the Quads back in action and realized that, good as the bass and sound-stage is on those Chailly's, there's a laser-like glare in the higher-mid-range - violins above the stave, fff high woodwind.

Despite all the technical advances in the past 50 years I'm hard put to identify a consistent improvement in recording quality. In fact the overall standard seems to have slipped. Recording levels have crept up, particularly in rock and jazz music, and the whole industry appears to be catering to people looking for maximum impact rather than subtlety in their music. Andrew Everard posted an interesting mini-article, Nov. Gramophone I believe, about how the direction of the recording industry has switched towards convenience of access and use, away from a quest for higher recording quality. Exactly the same thing happened in telecommunications. Just as the phone companies were able to offer superb quality over their land lines (remember the old 'you can hear a pin drop' ads?) people were discovering the convenience of cellular. For all its dropped calls, poor quality, iffyness, wireless is now the lifeblood  of telecom and many people no longer own a landline. Convenience and features have trampled all over quality.

Today there's some magnificent hi-fi hardware available. Software too. Bluray is capable of staggering recording quality. But recording producers know where their market is. For every person listening through a $15,000 hi-fi or home theatre system there are thousands taking in their music via a portable mp3 player and earbuds, or a mass-produced home theatre system.

I'm not holding my breath for a future of breathtaking, true-to-life recordings.