Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

---

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Digital Drive ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Your player already has fairly low jitter measurements

Posted by Christine Tham (R) on March 15, 2007 at 16:40:43

In Reply to: What Recommendations Would You Make? posted by Robertc88 on March 15, 2007 at 06:45:36:

I seem to recall Stereophile measured it at 178ps peak to peak - this is about half that of most universal players. Offhand, I know of only a handful of players with lower measured jitter (eg. Linn CD12, Sony SCD-1, and these are not that much lower maybe 140-150ps).

You will find it a struggle to achieve further significant reduction, ie. less than 100ps.

Worst case analysis suggests jitter as low as 20ps may be audible, but realistically the only way to get anyway close to there is a unit with no moving parts (ie. no transport), something like the Slim Devices Transporter for instance. The problem with these network music players is that they usually require a CPU fast enough to take audio off a network, and decode from various lossy and lossless compression formats, and all these CPU activity can generate jitter (through noise injected back into the power supply and then into the DAC).

Off the top of my head, if you really want to play around - try EMI/EFI shielding the audio cards, but I'll have to issue a warning: once you open the player up, you will realise everything is very tight in there (Sony really went overboard with the engineering) so there's very little room for tinkering.

You could also try to reshape the jitter spectrum (there's speculation that jitter audibility may be dependent on it's frequency profile). Replacing the clock, playing around with power supply regulation, are some potential avenues to explore, but not for the faint-hearted. Personally, I am not convinced that modders who do these sort of things actually result in lowering jitter (yes, they all claim it sounds better, but in reality it may just sound different, and different is not necessarily better). I have never seen empirical before and after jitter measurements as a result of modding a player.

Todd is right - at the end of the day almost anything and everything can cause jitter, so reducing it is not necessarily an easy task.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---