Implications of Esoteric G-0Rb atomic clock

Rgt; I seriously applaud the Nova player designers. They are solving issues that most other digital solutions fail to address. I have no doubt that the Nova is very close to the "top of the heap" digital offerings at this point in time. Much closer to analog, absolutely. Close your eyes and absolutely match analog though, just a smidgent short (but the Nova is very special sonically IMHO). From a technical analysis, the USB solution (that sonically amazed me) avoids interleaving the clock data with the streaming digital information (as compared to the Nova and others). I should note that there are many similarities here with both the Nova and USB solutions. They both address the read error issues which I suspect are part of the sonic 'breakthrough" toward analog. I still hold the direct comparison to analog as my final "tool", i.e. the digital solution that comes closest to sounding like a great analog rig or a master tape deserves the "top of the heap" moniker.

Askat; I think you are correct to assume we need to watch out for EMI/RF issues in the computer. I myself was wary of sonic gremlins associated with a computer's hard drive as the digital transport. Thankfully, the potential problematic gremlins seemed to be entirely absent when I heard the computer to USB DAC solution. (The computer was a current generation Apple computer with the CDs transferred to the computer's hard drive via Apple's internal error correction enabled). Are Apple computers inherently low EMI/RF designs? I have no idea. I do know that the particular Apple to USB DAC was the best digital solution that I've ever heard in terms of managing to sonically emulate a great analog front end.

Why is it not possible to repair a jitterized recording? Jitter is the minute variations in the time intervals between the bits, so if you remaster the recording using some form of reclocking device, you can get rid of these minute variations. How would a jitterized recording sound if it was remastered using the atomic clock in the reclocking circuit?

Chris

All of this sounds promising and something to look forward to. I'm wondering about any improvement here that can possibly address the limitations of red book brick wall filtering at the high freq. level , or will that still be the final impassable frontier to analog comparisons.

The very expensive Linn music servers use an ethernet connection to an NAS drive (as I understand it; i.e., quite imperfectly). Is this intrinsically superior to a USB connection, or is the interface irrelevant?

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.