Digital Drive

Posted by John C. - Aussie (A) on June 01, 2012 at 14:36:27

In Reply to: RE: Jitter posted by Tubers on June 01, 2012 at 01:42:26

Yes glare, edginess, harshness, particularly on higher amplitudes. When jitter becomes obtrusive it is hard to relax and enjoy the music. That said a lot of set ups mask the nasties of jitter so it is not so apparent. I sense a lot of audiophiles blame the speaker for the harshness - seems logical because that is where the sound comes from, but if they choose a speaker which sounds better all they are doing is suppressing the input rather than cleaning up the sound.

My mantra for years has been to concentrate on the most affordable input as the first area to upgrade. There is no escaping the GIGO principle. Sadly many of the jitter problems come from poor digital filtering, something which is a black art.

The latest and greatest here is termed "apodising" and the term has been coined by Ayre, PSAudio & Meridian although they do not all use exactly the same algorithm so buyer beware if others jump on the band wagon to use that term. The above 3 companies do have very effective digital filtering which shows up as excellent quality audio but that is not to say others have not achieved similar results with different approaches.

It has taken a few decades but IMHO audio quality via digital is now a mature product, one which is giving me better sound than I ever got from vinyl. And a lot of that has been better awareness of jitter problems and ways of avoiding them.

John

Enjoying over 9000 mostly classical CDs via Sennheiser HD800 headphones & a NuForce DAC9 on a Meridian Sooloos system.
The main 7.1 MC electrostatic speaker system is enjoyed at night for A/V