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To: Fred Mah who wrote (9233)	1/30/1998 3:44:00 AM
From: Jon Tara	Respond to of 13925

Fred, I suspect by "music over the Internet", he was actually referring to streaming audio, such as RealAudio. This is a bit different than downloading a WAV file, since streaming audio is played as it is received, on-the-fly. Although there is some "buffering", there are still issues involving bandwidth, reliability of the path, etc. And, in both cases (WAV and streaming) there are issues revolving around the encoding method. Almost all of this audio is compressed in some form - some lossless and some lossy. The type of compression, the speed of your connection, and the reliability of the connection will all affect the quality of streaming audio. Only the type of compression has an affect on downloaded WAV files. RealAudio and others play some tricks to try to maintain audio even under poor conditions, but this comes at a loss of quality when there is packet loss. For example, RealAudio "interleaves" samples into multiple packets, so that if a single packet is lost, instead of having a "drop out", you have a segment of audio which is somewhat lower quality. (Because it effectively has a lower sampling rate due to the lost samples.) If you have a 28.8 modem, I would say that the quality of the audio card is of secondary importance, as you are unlikely to get a solid audio stream, especially at higher sampling rates, and compression will have to be severe. If you have a higher-speed connection - ISDN, ADSL, cable modem - streaming audio can approach audiophile quality, and the quality of the sound card becomes more important, both in terms of convention audio specs (noise, distortion, etc.) and CPU throughput (as you dealing with higher-speed streams).