What does Jitter sound like?


I keep hearing the term jitter used to describe a kind of distortion that is especially problematic with CD Players.

What does Jitter sound like?
How can I identify it?
hdomke

Showing 1 response by bigamp

A lot of people still seem to not buy-in to jitter effecting sound. I get the impression people think that since their PC software loads fine from a CD without error, then their audio CDs should too. But it's different. Perhaps someone can explain what's happening in 10 words or less. Jitter occurs at different places-at the place where a cd is read and then between any (every) 2 points in the circuitry. Anyone want to take a stab at how this effects sound? E.G. "The edges of the bits are not square because of X, causing some 1s or 0s to get missed" or "The edges of the bits get fuzzy, causing the dac to approximate some bits.". Then there is latency jitter. I'm not saying either of these is correct, just giving illustrative examples. I'm no expert; looking for the experts to chime in.