Importance of clocking

I think that minimising jitter throughout the digital chain rather than just at the A/D conversion stage has primary importance. Buffering is not a recipe for avoiding jitter. And it‘s the quality of the clock more than the length of the cables that matters

OP:

Um, yeah, OK. I’m going to sit here and wait for you to explain to me how on earth you would even reclock a TCP/IP stream without actually buffering it.

Just lemme know when you work out that mathmagic.

Erik

Buffering is not a recipe for avoiding jitter.

Yes, it is.  With asynchronous USB data is delivered in packets (frames) to buffer at some time intervals, for instance 1ms - for instance 44 samples,   DAC delivers each sample to D/A converter in exact intervals (cannot be improved) signaling back buffer over/under flow.  Problem of data coming at different or uneven intervals is eliminated by the buffer and back signaling.  Synchronizing time of the frame delivery with D/A clock won’t help because D/A converter already operates at exactly even intervals.

In case of SPdif buffering in DAC won’t help because without back signaling data night be coming too fast or too slow.  It can be fixed by reclocking or most often to adjust D/A conversion rate to average rate of incoming data.

What might help with asynchronous USB is isolation that prevents injection of electrical noise from computer to DAC.   Reclocking has nothing to do with improvement but people buy it likely because it sounds promising.

@kijanki 

What about the clock accuracy releasing the buffer, then?

What about the clock accuracy releasing the buffer, then?

I specifically addressed this in my first message. You literally can’t avoid jitter without buffering, but in the case of a network stream from outside the home having more "clocking" at upstream devices, without buffers doesn’t help you because the original stream has huge amounts of packet to packet variation (huge relative to an audio or video playback). In fact you can end up in a situation where your original DAC’s jitter is worse because there’s an upstream "reclocker" that has so much jitter it’s forcing the downstream DAC to misbehave.

The best possible place to put a fancy clock is less than an inch away from the DAC. External clocks are used to produce music in the cases of multiple DAC’s or streams happening at once, as in the case multi track recordings and mix-downs. Those clocks do NOT however dejitter anything.