It is with a sigh and sadness that I read, once again, that some of our members have such a shallow understanding of digital information.

Simply: if all the little ones and zeros are recognized properly by the receiving equipment in the proper order and are ‘captured’ within the ‘windows of time’ allotted, it matters not how pristine the actual electrical signals were or whether they arrived via gold, silver, copper, plastic, leather or horsehair. That is one of the basic reasons behind, and the concept/design of digital information, in the first place.

Let me put it to you another way: can you tell, by studying the quality of the text now displayed before your eyes, whether the data that created it arrived via a barely maintained, slow dial-up connection, an average dsl/cable broadband connection, a home-based FIOS connection, or an even faster ‘more direct’ commercial connection? Would the text be more crisp, clear, even ‘stellar’, if my computer were connected directly to yours, now, ‘live’, via a million-dollar high-end cable?