In Reply to: RE: digital or analog posted by Tobias on December 17, 2014 at 19:03:53:
The issue here is the rise time of the signal, with fast rise times involving much higher frequencies than the base signaling rate. However, the rise time is not infinite and the frequencies involved are limited. If the cable is sufficiently short then there won't be an issue, i.e. the cable will not have to be analyzed as a transmission line. If the cable is short enough, reflections from previous transitions will have died out as well. This means that there won't be audio signal dependent jitter.
A DAC that uses SPDIF must have some means to deal with jitter on its input, e.g. some kind of reclocking or clock cleaning, typically done with some combination of buffers and PLL(s). If it doesn't have this then the DAC is junk. If it does jitter on SPDIF will have at worst a second order effect on sound quality (e.g. residuals sneaking pass a PLL) or a tertiary effect (e.g. ground bounce on DAC clock circuitry cause by noise generated by the SPDIF receiver circuitry bypasses reclocking).
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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- RE: digital or analog - Tony Lauck 12/18/1409:25:38 12/18/14 (0)