Jitter, CDPs, Transports and Streaming


In my personal, digital audio journey, I have found that I prefer the sound of CD players over streaming through my computer to a DAC. I have tried 4-5 different steaming/transport configurations and found CD players to sound more natural with less digital glare and cause less listener fatigue in each comparison I made. I attribute this to jitter and the increased levels caused by noisy computer environments and the additional circuitry and wiring between a source/transport and DAC. I am sure component quality plays a role here and I’m sure there are CD transport and DAC combinations that sound better than some standalone CD players.

I got to thinking that DACs have buffers that they read from and realized that the upstream source shouldn’t matter, but they apparently do. Why doesn’t the buffer completely eliminate the relevance of the quality of the source? Are there types of DACs, like asynchronous DACs, that make the CD transport or computer source quality irrelevant?
mkgus

Showing 1 response by teo_audio

Noise floor and dynamic ranging capacity have little to do with being able to hear jitter in a signal. The two have no direct correlation, only minimal aspects of correlation.

Reclockers or reclocking designs, chips, circuits and said implementations of such... can make for worse jitter going in (to the dacs proper), than was originally received from the given source point, so one has to be careful. Re-clocking is not a wonder ointment cure-all. It is generally considered to be a good idea but it does, or can... create a brick wall jitter reduction effect, that the reclocker is then crowned the king of jitter issues for that system.

Being able to hear jitter changes as pass through from the one device to another, is a good sign, generally (but only possibly!), that less jitter harm is being done by the receiver as the jitter changes upstream are not being swamped by intrinsic jitter noise, but it does not mean that intrinsic jitter problems of the receiver do not exist. It means there is some minimal transparency aspects. For better or for worse.

Meaning, in clarity, that when I read about a device having a reclocker that offers low jitter, and it is stated that it ’fixes everything’... I remain wary and suspect of it’s purchase and/or use, as this means I’m quite possibly brick-walled in my attempts to try and fix jitter in the entire final usable pathway, via upgrades in source point or digital cable choices. But again, only possibly. It all remains as a crap shoot. Nothing new.....