Skinny;382055 Wrote: > I'm with you on that. Bits will be bits. > With you on that as well. > I would have once said that bits are bits (and so they are) but without an accurate clock bits can't be reproduced into the waveform they represent.
Since the S/PDIF standard doesn't provide a clock connection, unlike some professional digital audio interfaces, the DAC is left to reconstruct the clock as best it can from the waveform transmitted over the coax or optical fiber link. If there is variability on the received waveform, due to imperfections such as impedance mismatch, slew-rate limitations etc, then the clock recovery will be subject to timing jitter, at least to a certain extent. Since this same derived clock determines when a new DAC word is available in the analog domain, it is of importance to control the timing jitter to within reasonable bounds, otherwise it will create side-bands in the frequency domain of sufficient magnitude to be audible. A well-designed DAC may take a lot appropriate measures to combat timing jitter on the internally derived word clock to the extent that there is no audible difference between the two types of connection. I don't know enough about the DacMagic to say for sure. At one time this was not well understood at all, but it is now. The only real controversy is: how good is good enough? The following paper is a good reference for the technically minded. http://www.scalatech.co.uk/papers/aes93.pdf If that is way too long, you may like this one: http://www.audiocraftersguild.com/AandE/npt.on.jitter2.htm Best regards, --dsdreamer -- dsdreamer ---------------------- "Dreamer, easy in the chair that really fits you..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dsdreamer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=12588 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=57942 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
