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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: RE: I was attempting to be careful with my attributions to jitter. posted by Scab on January 21, 2008 at 20:20:10:
HowdyThere are no guarantees...
You need to pick your transport and DAC or one box player based on it's sound not it's technical specs. I'm all in favor of using specs to help narrow the field down but you can't predict the sound based on any given spec or feature (e.g. filterless, non-oversampling, bitstream DAC, multibit DAC, ASRC, 8x oversampling... hard disc based, or specs on jitter spectra, etc.)
Well, I take it back a little you can get some idea if you have a lot of experience you can look at the Stereophile tests and see some obvious things about the quality of the analog section, the linearity of the DAC, etc. and get a little idea of the sound.
Back to jitter:
First off once again don't pick a DAC/transport or single box player based purely on it's jitter specs.
Secondly don't get too worried, we are talking fairly subtle differences here, but they are the kinds of differences that people might care about when they consider spending 1000s of dollars on a transport or DAC, not merely a few 100.
Jitter isn't a problem till you convert to (or from) analog and only then does it matter at all, hence you want a system which deals with the jitter as close the DAC as possible and secondarily you want to use good components, wiring, etc. to avoid generating as much jitter upstream as possible.
Jitter reduction boxes (especially those which are separate components added into your chain) may make things a little better or a little worse depending on the transceivers, cables and quality of your other components. It's up to each person whether they like the sound better with them in the system or not.
ASRC is another technology touted as being less sensitive to jitter, but it transforms incoming jitter into (permanent) changes in the data stream and unless it's right next to the DAC chip proper (say on the same printed circuit board) and there is a very good local clock more jitter can creep in to spoil things even further. Personally I don't like it in principle, but I have a fine sounding DAC built around an older ASRC chip that I can't complain about it at it's price point.
DACs which support a clock out will often have lower jitter (when you use that feature) than those that don't, but not all transports/computer audio interfaces accept a clock in...
It's a little harder to say what feature names to look for in a USB based DAC since there isn't standard nomenclature (at least for non-techies) to describe those that are capable of having the DAC be the master: i.e. using the Pull model where either the DAC provides the clock to the computer/transport or the DAC asks for blocks of data at the right times.
Even when none of the above is done there are devices which implement their jitter reduction (and everything else) well and sound fine. At that point we are in the same boat as those who claim that the Linn CD12 or EMM Labs DAC6e would sound better if it didn't use a switching power supply. Well sometimes people build great sounding equipment even when others might argue about some of their particular design choices.
-Ted
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Follow Ups
- There are no guarantees :) - Ted Smith 01/21/0821:56:45 01/21/08 (1)
- Thank You for Your Response nt - Scab 09:11:55 01/22/08 (0)
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