DAC improvements slowing down?

Scvan - until you experience really low jitter, you will not understand. It is never low enough IME. I perform jitter demonstrations at nearly every trade show, as well as contrasting the sound of AIFF, ALAC and FLAC with wav files. Every single attendee hears the difference.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I think along the lines of what Mapman said, given my limited experience. My music coming from a PC, when I moved from a previous configuration to having an Audiophilleo in the chain there was a very noticeable improvement. I recently tried an exaSound e22 that has femto clock and it didn't sound better than the Audiophilleo plus Metrum Octave.

Obviously, several factors at play here, not simply jitter, but I was expecting a big impact from the femto clock. Just didn't happen for me.

Lew - I tried a Femtoclock and even designed a module for it with regulators etc. It didn't measure any better than my previous clock module. It may have lower jitter at 20MHz, but this is not important with audio.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I own a Schiit Bifrost - had it over a year now. It is 24/192 across all inputs

They just came out with an upgrade to the USB which blew my socks off - such a huge improvement.

Will things keep getting g better - I believe so if this latest upgrade is anything to go by.

The Gungnir is even better.

What will happen is the cost of the better technology will come down.

Regards

Come to think on it - I guess 30 years ago you could have asked the same about Turntables.

Turntable improvements/upgrades/tweaks are more prevalent now than at any time in the past.

Same thing will probably happen to DAC's.

One can live in hope :-)