jitter

I have heard dcs Vivaldi with and without masterclock and the difference isn‘t small.  Similarly adding Cybershaft or Antelope clocks to a number of top end dacs (where pos) yields significant improvements. The effect is particularly pronounced in soundstaging and separation of instruments in terms of attack and decay. Sigital is all about timing and the Ed Meitner argument on cable loosses isn‘t born out in my experience.

I currently have Gustard x26 pro DAC with built in jitter control. Gustard brags about their external clock which is almost the price of the DAC. Is there any need for that and will it enhance the sound quality in any way, even if Im not experiencing jitter problems ?  Does my question make sense?

Sadly, this Stereophile review of a dCS Rossini did not do comparative tests.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/dcs-rossini-player-rossini-clock-measurements

If we had, then we'd be able to see how the bare unit compares to other bare units and how much the clock improves or changes the results.   It is interesting to compare the jitter performance to the $1,999 Benchmark DAC, which costs 1/4 of the dCS clock alone. 

While personal preferences trump all measurements, I have trouble thinking of an external clock of $8k as being a good value.

@bobbyloans 

There is actually a simple way to find out: buy a cheap $100 clock on alibaba and if that is an improvement, the more expensive clock will be more so. The Gustard from memeory takes a 10mhz master clock, those are broadly available.

@jw944ts

Sampling clock jitter is inherent to the digitization process so it can't be removed by anything in the playback chain. Here's a good overview from Texas Instruments on how sampling clock jitter affects ADC performance - https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slyt338/slyt338.pdf?ts=1698696178966&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252F

Practically speaking, given today's ADC performance, clock accuracy and the relatively low input frequencies of audio vs. sampling a signal at radio frequencies, this type of jitter can most likely be considered inaudible.

For example in the paper linked above, the 'average' jitter is calculated at 26 ps which equates to spurious frequency components that are ~100 dB below the RF carrier frequency. If we translated this to an example at audio frequencies, even with music playing at rock concert levels (110 dB), the jitter would still be quieter than a whisper (~10 dB). If we also account for the fact that we now have sampling clocks with femtosecond accuracy (as in the case of RME's SteadyClock technology), the jitter components will be below the threshold of perception in virtually all cases.