What you can do at home is listen. If you hear a good track on another friends system that has superb focus, clarity and liveness and your system makes the vocalist 2 feet wide and the guitar 1 foot wide, then you have jitter. If you hear echoes or "fill" between instruments in your system and not in your friends system, you have jitter.
There are standard jitter tests that display the spectrum of the jitter on the D/A output given a standard input signal from a disk. If you were an engineer with the right equipment you could perform these measurements.
The problem is that even if you could, the results are not well correlated to listening tests. I mean really bad jitter in the measurements is audible, but more subtle jitter can be just as audible and will not show up in the measurements. This is the problem with the state of our measurement technology today. May improve in the future though.
What you can do at home to improve jitter from your transport is:
1) treat the disks with Ultrabit platinum
2) spray-coat the top side on the disk with a rubber coating to reduce vibration - get this at Home Depot or Michaels etc.. Mask it properly with thin card stock.
3) re-write the disk on CDROM using DBpoweramp on PC or XLD on Mac - this improves the pit shape over the commercial disk
4) pay a modder to install a new clock and clock voltage regulator/power supply
#4 will make the biggest improvement in a CDP, but you will still benefit from 1-3 even with the modded clock.
Steve N.
Empirical Audio
