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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Inexpensive can = good enough or .... ?

Nice post Soldermizer!

Extraordinary claims are made all the time in the audiophile hobby that surely demands extraordinary evidence. After all these years, surely we know a thing or two about the limits of human perception.

Even though there might be some folks with amazing hearing abilities, for the vast number of us, it's hard to imagine that picosecond jitter measurements like the ODAC would be audible in the test signal; much less in actual MUSIC where background noise would easily overcome whatever sidebands may be produced during playback. Furthermore, as we get older and high frequency response decreases, sensitivity to these jitter sidebands likewise declines.

Until there's evidence otherwise, I think the Benjamin & Gannon paper from 1998 makes sense. In music, jitter appeared inaudible below 20ns which is a lot higher than the hundreds of picoseconds generally measured and even higher than what one can only consider as poorly executed/engineered expensive gear like Zanden 5000 Mk.IV, Audio Note CD-4.1x, or McIntosh MS750 media server based on the Stereophile measurements. Notice how the subjective reviewers generally still give positive impressions despite these obscene objective results!


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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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