Really controversial idea...

[Jaco]

Thanks for your reply Phil. Yes, I'm also interested in hearing what different amounts of jitter sound like. That could be an intersting experiment.

A good friend of mine is a recording engineer and we've experimented quite a lot with the "good sounding" harmonic distortion of valve pre-amps. It's an eye-opening experience for most people that have not being exposed to it before!

Being an electronics engineer with a master's degree in digital signal processing I typically prefer the more elegant technical solutions. :-) Unfortunately that is not what I'm seeing with the transport being the clock master - hence my leaning towards the solution where the DAC is the clock master which simplifies things considerably, and hopefully bringing down the price of high quality digital audio.

I agree that existing solutions using the PLL or re-clocking/re-sampling approaches do sound good. However, the really good ones do come at a considerable cost in financial terms My believe is that the DAC as clock master can make even a cheap CD player a great digital source. Now we need to work on the cost of DAC's which can act as clock masters...

That's just the engineer in me striving towards the more elegant and more economical solutions...

[seanadams]

20kHz is 50ns for full cycle, or 25ns for half cycle. Some parts of the body are clearly quite fast reacting.

Teemu

Close - you're only off by a factor of a thousand.

milli = 10^-3
micro = 10^-6
nano = 10^-9
pico = 10^-12

At any rate, the ear doesn't work like that. It picks up frequencies, not samples over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_of_Corti

Anatomically speaking, I suppose you could say that jitter would, for each frequency component of the signal, cause additional slight stimulation of the hair cells right next to the intended one for that frequency.

[Patrick Dixon]

I just don't think jitter lends itself to a measurement-audible quality correlation in the same way as (say) THD or IMD.

In many ways there are similarities between jitter and distortion measurements, as they are all commonly expressed as 'a number', although the spectral content behind the headline number is probably just as important.

[Phil Leigh]

In many ways there are similarities between jitter and distortion measurements, as they are all commonly expressed as 'a number', although the spectral content behind the headline number is probably just as important.

Patrick - that's what I meant in my inelegant way...the headlines are not the whole story...

[tot]

Close - you're only off by a factor of a thousand.

I had a gut feeling something was terribly wrong, but went ahead regardless .. :-)