Jitter reduction, best device?

not necessarily. why does esoteric build a $10k external clock? why does dcs build the 3 box setup for $60k. thats like saying you can buy the cheapest cd player but the dac will fix all symptoms. those pieces sound wonderful but at a price. IMO, you want to use the best quality pieces that you can spend to get the best sound. you are not going to buy a cable that will perform miracles with a mediocre dac or cd player. the only way to tell if something will work or not is to demo it. or just leave things like they are and be happy withwhat you got. but you can't say you trust your ears and you would know what you are missing.

Rbstehno, I do not doubt for a second that some serious clocks can be had for that kind of change.

I would just like to point out that chances are quite good that audiophiles have a number of CD's in their collection that was digitally mastered utilizing a Meridian 518 or 618 (pro version). I just can't comprehend what spending 60k is going to achieve beyond what the mastering engineer had produced in the first place. My opinion is "good enough for the engineer, good enough in my system."

Jitter is noise in time domain. Jitter produces sidebands at very low levels but audible since not harmonically related to root frequencies. Jitter free sound has more clarity (free of noise).

Many CD were made from poorly digitized tapes and contain A/D converter jitter that cannot be removed.

As for device - Benchmark DAC1 does excellent job with jitter. Its jitter bandwidth of only few Hz translates to about 100dB of jitter suppression at few kHz.

Jitter comes from recording, transport, cable (reflections on impedance boundaries and noise) and DACs clock jitter.

Yes, I'm becoming increasingly aware that jitter is indeed a real threat to digital sound quality.

If you have good ears and a decent DAC and your digital sources sound good compared to other sources, then you're rig probably has a handle on the jitter. If not, then jitter is a likely culprit. You'll probably only know its a problem once its gone.

The best way I know to reduce jitter to the lowest possible levels is to do it internally inside the player/unit where the unit is extracting digital information from a CD/DVD/SACD disc or a hard drive. This is done via a internal clock replacment with a ultra low jitter fine tuned clock. Either by replacing a master clock or clocking that feeds a chip that extracts the information.

If you add in some other "reclocking device" after the fact (ie: outside the box...) you are just bandaiding the problem. Fix the problem at the source, which is the poor jitter/phase noise feeding the DSP chip responsible for all the decoding (a very cheap crystal oscillator). This is accomplished by inducing an ultra low jitter clock signal (stable frequency) to the mix. The results are astonishing!!!! You can now realize the true performance the artists intended! I hope this helps you guys out!