P Floding wrote:
pfarrell Wrote:
Especially since the jitter problem is just fiction to make
people spend money.
I can believe it was a real problem decades ago. I see nothing
to indicate that any recent audiophile equipment has any audible
differences any more.
Decades ago?
Why don't all transports sound the same then?
Or was it just a flamestarter?
Not an attempt to flame at all, which you should be
able to tell from my prior postings.
I just do not believe that jitter is a serious problem anymore.
I don't know what a transport is. Except for a very few (count them on
one hand) all the CD/DVD/SACD players use commodity PC transports.
It is unreasonable to expect that different brands using the same
parts would have different sounds.
Last month's The Absoute Sound raved about a CD player that
costs $33,000. It is beyond my understanding how it could be even
three times better than a $10,000 CD player.
All CD/DVD/SACD players pull bits from the plastic disk.
Bits are bits. Perhaps there is a difference in how they read,
focus lengths, ECC, etc. But I doubt it.
There are different DAC chips out there. Some are really expensive and
cost as much as $10 each. Probably sonic differences there.
And the analog signal paths can have impact on sound. No argument there,
unless someone can implement straight wire with gain.
But if you are talking about extracting bits from the plastic disk
and transporting it to a DAC (external or internal), I don't see
how any sort of transport has any impact on sound.
When the digital signal has proper ECC, there is nothing you
can do to change the bits. That is one of the solid beauties
of being digital.
And for stereo, with modern systems, I don't see that jitter is a
problem. Clock skew is a big problem in multi-channel recording studios,
because you have more channels of signal than you can have on a two
channel ADC. So there is lots of potential for clock skew causing
all sorts of evil stuff. The solution for that is a master clock driving
all the ADCs, and any number of vendors will gladly sell you
a clock, and all pro recording gear has clock inputs.
For SqueezeBox to DAC to amp to speakers, in stereo, I just don't see
it. I don't see credible reasons for it in the audiophile
magazines, I don't see any engineering reason for it.
And I sure don't see any reason to spend my hard earned money on a
problem that doesn't seem to be real.
YMMV.
If you want to talk about 24 bit samples at high sample rates,
I can totally believe that there is an audible difference.
But the industry completely screwed up SACD and DVD-A to the
point that no one cares about them, and transports that support them are
becoming fewer. And major artists' labels are not releasing material on
them. So high-wide, while wonderful, is like vinyl -- a niche product
for a tiny subset of audiophiles. high-wide could have finally killed
vinyl, but it failed.
--
Pat Farrell PRC recording studio
http://www.pfarrell.com/PRC
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