Kacz, that is a hard one. Sometimes it makes the sound soft and mushy, sometimes it makes it harsh and edgy. But it always reduces the focus and resolution. I guess ther must be different forms of jitter which interact with DACs in different ways. The best way I can think to describe it is that it screws up the harmonics. I have never seen or heard anyone explain why, but it just seems that a data stream with jitter entering a DAC chip causes harmonic distortion in the output of that DAC chip.
CD Transport to DAC Timing/Jitter
I am not clear on the source of excessive jitter that can occur between a CD transport and DAC. As I understand it the transport internal oscillator acts as the master system clock. The DAC in turn runs on recovered clock derived from the incoming transport signal. If this is true then the only thing that should cause timing jitter is long strings of consecutive zeros which would adversely affect the DAC clock recovery circuitry. I would think that this would be prevented by scrambling the data or by some zero substitution algorithm similar to what is used in the telecommunications world. Any ideas/comments on this issue?