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Does streaming defy the laws of physics?

I understand how a high quality power conditioning system can take the raw lower quality electricity in the residential power utility system delivers to a normal American house which delivers that same low quality electricity to our electric outlets and "purifies" it before it enters our source components and then each component (source, preamp, and amplifier) in turn adds its specific power conditioning to suppot production of beautiful music. 

What i dont understand is the digital equivalent of this delivery transformation.  Starting from my internet service provider over commercial grade wire from my cable company to my house then through whatever quality coax wire my home builder used 25 years ago to my router then the commercial Cat 5 wire in my ethernet LAN to the wall connector where I finally connect to my DAC. Is the digital signal at that wall ethernet outlet bit-perfect with all the subtleties and nuances sent out by the Tidal server I'm connected to or is it like my utility power that needs "a miracle occurs here" purification to restore anything that was lost during the bits long journey to that point?  Is the role of my systems digital Hardware/firmware/software to perform that "miracle" of knowing what got lost in translation?
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Showing 1 response by nekoaudio

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nekoaudio
105 posts
 
The Internet protocols used for typical consumer audio and video streaming services are bit-perfect, otherwise things break exactly like @erik_squires was saying.

There are some Internet protocols used for streaming that are not bit-perfect, but those tend to be used for things like real-time audio and video where minimum delay is more important than data integrity. These are not used for Netflix or most streaming services.

So don’t worry about all the stuff that’s getting those bits to you from across the planet. The electrical engineers, software developers, and computer scientists who designed that stuff have pretty much guaranteed you’ll get a bit-perfect copy every single time. Using the laws of physics to do so.
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