Bob,
I think the key phrase in the article is "in a correctly designed CD playback system ". Many are not correctly designed and have excessive jitter, often caused by poor layout as much as poor design (e.g.stray capacitance of circuit traces, noisy oscillator power supplies).
Once one adds a separate DAC things get even worse with very poor SPDIF transmit/receive designs.
So I agree that in a correctly designed player, which need not cost more than $500, jitter should not be an issue. In practise though I think it often is.
I know one of the project engineers that worked on the new Rega Apollo decoder chipset. The Rega is universally praised as one of the best CD players under $1000. In his opinion the reason it is so good is because the decoder delivers a very low jitter very well defined eye pattern, and the DAC is presented with a very stable clock.
I think the key phrase in the article is "in a correctly designed CD playback system ". Many are not correctly designed and have excessive jitter, often caused by poor layout as much as poor design (e.g.stray capacitance of circuit traces, noisy oscillator power supplies).
Once one adds a separate DAC things get even worse with very poor SPDIF transmit/receive designs.
So I agree that in a correctly designed player, which need not cost more than $500, jitter should not be an issue. In practise though I think it often is.
I know one of the project engineers that worked on the new Rega Apollo decoder chipset. The Rega is universally praised as one of the best CD players under $1000. In his opinion the reason it is so good is because the decoder delivers a very low jitter very well defined eye pattern, and the DAC is presented with a very stable clock.