Jitter reduction, best device?

Hens,

the bottom line is that with a DAC which doesn't reclock or reduce jitter (AN 1.1X Sig.) this jitter reduction device made a significant difference.

Interesting. Your observations suggest that for those connecting gear through digital interfaces it is worth investigating this issue when selecting a DAC. For those with a DAC already (particularly an older generation DAC that rarely had anything other than a simple PLL), this points the way towards a postential improvement.

Shadorne, that certainly fits with my findings. I intend to see if I can borrow a benchmark DAC or DACMagic in the next few weeks to see if the DIP makes a difference with a DAC with its own jitter reduction system. I would expect much less impact in such a scenario but if there is still a significant difference it could also suggest that the strngth of the signal is also an important factor as the DIP amplifies this signal from around 0.5 volts to 5 volts. Should be interesting.

hens - i also use the monarchy in my audio system. i also heard a huge improvement when i inserted this device before the dac. i also use other brand jitter devices in my den and rec room and they also made a large improvement in the quality.

mapman - if your skeptical, then you will probably never be happy with a setup like this because in the back of your mind, you think other alternatives will be better. why don't you think a pc can read a cd as well as a cd player? check out who makes the transport mechanisms in "all" the world. probably 2 or 3 companies: philips, sony, are probably the most popular. so what has the most smarts: computer or cd player? what has the most memory/buffer to hold data read off the cd before sending it down its channel?

i am a computer nerd and when i hear people say that pcs/macs aren't capable to produce good sound, i get frustrated because it isn't true.

do you think that reading music off a cd player is any different than reading bits off a cd when loading a program onto your pc? how many times have you had issues loading a program off the cd with corrupted data or issues that the bits couldn't be read properly off the cd?

now as for sound quality, the pc/mac isn't very good, but thats were jitter devices and external dacs come in. the roku will not improve the sound any, you need much more equipment to do that.

also, reclocking is not done at the level you are talking about. normally a clock device has to talk on a peer-to-peer basis with the source (say a cd player) so the 2 devices can get in sync with each other. the benchmark will not do that. the esoteric clock and transport devices do that, along with the dcs pieces.

my advice to you is to go listen to a good quality system or go read some of the articles that state that ripped cd's can sound better than the original disk if done properly. you might be surprised.

Rbstehno,

I know a PC can provide a good digital source because I am doing exactly that in my system alongside feeding from a CD player/transport.

In my case though the true source from the DACs perspective is the Roku Soundbridge, which is a device designed for good sound at its price point. The laptop computer source is not even known to the DAC.

I do think it is more hit or miss from computer to computer in general though, depending on details and specific configuration and topology, because different components and interface implementations exist in different computers and many, particularly older ones, are not necessarily designed for performance levels that audio buffs expect.

For $200, the Roku or other devices like it like the Squeezebox take source computer mostly out of the equation regarding sound quality, so it is a good approach in my mind.

Not to say some computers may offer up great sound directly as well. I'm sure some do but I'm not sure that all do.

I started out at first with an analog feed from my computer to my system. That was a halfway decent but ultimately flawed approach. Where I am at now is pretty much where I think most audiophiles would like to be.

"do you think that reading music off a cd player is any different than reading bits off a cd when loading a program onto your pc? "

No. Reading music versus other kinds of files from a CD optical, magnetic hard drive or even physical menmory is no different at all.

But re-constructing an analog signal in the DAC, based on the clock, is an additional scenario that comes into play after wards in digital sound reproduction. I believe different sources do this differently with varying degrees of accuracy. For example, USB uses a software driver. Some may be better than others I would suspect.

The result if the bits are not processed at the DAC at exactly the right time is jitter, as I understand it, and jitter frequencies and levels do affect the resulting sound.