It's probably me, but I actually do not understand why dd's input block
size does matter in this case where input is not a file or block device.
That's probably because dd is not realy a unix program(1) and I even did not
understand pip (on cp/m 68k).

Anyway - why does block size on the input side of dd matter if we are
reading from a pipe? Is it just that dd is not prepared to cope with
asynchronous input? If so, we would need ibs=1, wouldn't we?

Martin

(1) = I recently learned that ed is the most representive unix program,
so dd must be it's counterpart.