Audio Streaming vs. Syncing

I don't have an apple tv, but I am an audiophile "snob" with about $12k in my home stereo. I stream my lossless audio to airport express. (Also, I use a wired connection, since I'm in a urban area with lots of interference, I get lots of dropouts using wifi). Streaming in computer land is not "true" streaming in the audio sense of the word. Streaming media on a computer-based system involves buffering at the target end, which makes the latency and jitter *identical* to syncing the media files locally. Tell your friend he is not gaining anything in quality by syncing the files locally.

If the apple products did indeed use real-time streaming, your friend would be right. You'd get better latency and jitter numbers reading local media. But that's not how the appletv or airport express or ANY (consumer grade) computer based playback actually works.

In case you/he are curious:

From airport express, it goes via toslink to my Genesis Digital Lens for jitter reduction. (Airport express has a lot of jitter in the toslink output signal due to poor quality clock and other low quality internal components).

From the Genesis Digital Lens, the signal travels via balanced AES/EBU connection to my DAC, a Northstar Designs M192 DAC.

From the DAC, the signal travels via unbalanced RCA to my amplifier, a Cary SLI-80.

From the amplifier to the speakers, which are from Tyler Acoustics.

 

I've got 2 160gbtvs and sync them both, my main itunes is on my imac and I have a nearly identical itunes on my macbook.

I see no reason to stream