Is an Async DAC Needed to Reduce Jitter when playing CDs?

As an aside, technically, the best way to reduce jitter is to put a great clock in a CD player and co-locate the DAC in the CD Player chassis. Much of the problems with jitter and it's reduction occurs from having them live separately. 

But also, in the last few years the precision of inexpensive clocks has improved by several orders of magnitude, so there are many relatively inexpensive solutions now which are as pleasant sounding as the best of a decade ago. 

It's still important, but wow, so many good choices. 

Hi Cheeg,

Really depends on the quality of the CD player itself, as well as the DAC. DACs employ a number of strategies to reduce the absolute jitter, but to some extent are still at the mercy of the CD. 

No, the type of DAC isn't as important as the input buffer, memory size, clock and strategy of the DAC. 

I would not focus very much on this however, and instead encourage you to use your own ears. I mean, yes, in absolute terms, a great DAC with asynchronous or shared clock signals has the best chances of reducing jitter, but DAC's and CD players in the last decade are really really good to the point where I don't know I would hear the difference most of the time. 

Best,


E