Speed/pitch "error"

[frecor]

I use Deadbeef in bit-perfect mode, and it's the best-sounding music player I've heard, with a stunning level of realism and detail. I use it to drive my Zen DAC V2, which I leave powered-up all the time with a cheap wall-wart for best sound quality, although this doesn't help some DACs which could really use it. I've also tried Strawberry in "bit perfect" mode, but it sounds artificial, as if it's equalized to sound like ear-candy, and not as clean as Deadbeef, and I can't stand it after hearing Deadbeef in bit-perfect mode.

But when I Google "Deadbeef sound quality," the only relevant page in the search-results is Deadbeef plays all music files at the wrong pitch/speed #2680 #2680, in which a user claimed that it plays music at the wrong speed, and Oleksiy Yakovenko responded that the choice is between bit-perfect playback or the correct speed.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but it seems to me that any decent DAC these days is asynchronous and has its own clock, and would therefore determine the playback speed, and that it would pull data from the server's output buffer as needed. Meanwhile, the player would pull data from storage and push it into the buffer as required to maintain some optimal range of data in the buffer. So, how would the player affect playback speed?