Chris, your question about repairing source material jitter involves a bit more complexity than what the Esoteric Rubidium is actually accomplishing. A good way to think of exotic reclocking devices (such as the Esoteric) is they are repairing the myriads of synchronization issues associated with the abysmal SPDIF connection. With a SPDIF's flawed approach, the clocking information is interleaved with the music data. The Esoteric Rubidium's incredible improvements seem to prove how poor the idea of interleaving clock information along with the music data has been all along! Of course, we can do this much more elegantly if we don't even try to interleave the clocking data on top of music in the first place. Can we say "USB" ;-)
Lapaix; Linn seems to be on the right track in choosing a high bandwidth connection. The ability for a DAC to be able to talk "back and forth" to the computer hard drive (while the music is playing!) assures a much better opportunity to achieve a perfect data tranafer to the DAC. It also is apparent that a standard USB connection easily exceeds the bandwidth requirements for the DAC to talk back and forth to the computer. Is Linn's higher bandwidth approach even better? I think the jury is still out here. I do know that the USB DAC I heard sonically eclipses Linn's best offerings by MORE than just a hair. Perhaps Linn should take a second look at the other parts within their music servers? If they can develop similar advancements elsewhere, the stratospheric pricing of Linn's music servers could be more easily justified IMHO.
Lapaix; Linn seems to be on the right track in choosing a high bandwidth connection. The ability for a DAC to be able to talk "back and forth" to the computer hard drive (while the music is playing!) assures a much better opportunity to achieve a perfect data tranafer to the DAC. It also is apparent that a standard USB connection easily exceeds the bandwidth requirements for the DAC to talk back and forth to the computer. Is Linn's higher bandwidth approach even better? I think the jury is still out here. I do know that the USB DAC I heard sonically eclipses Linn's best offerings by MORE than just a hair. Perhaps Linn should take a second look at the other parts within their music servers? If they can develop similar advancements elsewhere, the stratospheric pricing of Linn's music servers could be more easily justified IMHO.