DAC improvements slowing down?

Jitter is to digital sound much like focus is to digital photos.

No digital photo has perfect focus, but the percent of error can easily be so small with modern digital cameras that practically it does not matter.

Same with jitter in time dimension with digital sound. Below certain thresholds, practically the smearing of the sound that results will not be detected or matter. It is a form of distortion though, so it is never a good thing.

BBC studies are worthless IMO. They need better system and trained listeners as well as good quality tracks. I doubt if they had any of these three.

I have made improvements in the jitter of my products on the order of 30psec P-P and easily heard the difference.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Mapman,

Thank you for the clarification. Your explanation matches my understanding. Based on studies done at the beginning of the development of digital sound reproduction jitter was studied and the threshold of jitter was determined. There are no modern DACs that have jitter beyond what people can hear, but yet there is lots of talk about it. So what makes one DAC sound different than another if it is not jitter?

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1974-11.pdf

How are your studies better than the BBC?

Like I said, they need a better system and trained listeners as well as good quality tracks. I doubt if they had any of these three. The results point to that.

Also, the nature of the jitter is important. If they are generating random jitter, then this is not at all like the jitter in real audio systems. It is usually correlated in some way.

Jitter has three attributes:
1) amplitude
2) frequency
3) distribution

All of these are important and not just one measurement. They all vary with each other.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio