New Lampizator Level 4/ Version 4 DAC in the house

This is what I say on every forum. The jitter of the digital source is MORE IMPORTANT than the DAC. It's true. And Empirical Audio has been developing lower and lower jitter products for more than 15 years.

You must understand what jitter is and how it should be measured if you want to make intelligent decisions. A single RMS or even peak-to-peak jitter number is grossly insufficient. If you purchase gear based on such specs, you are making a gross error. The first flag that everyone should raise with a product is if they claim to eliminate jitter or have zero jitter. Impossible.

Jitter occurs as a Gaussian distribution of cycle-times. If you only publish one number, you don't know the shape of the Gaussian curve. It could be wide a flat or narrow and tall and still have the same RMS jitter number. The "tails" of the jitter distribution are also important. If these P-P maximums only occur every 20-30 seconds, this is totally inaudible. At Empirical Audio, we measure the jitter distribution in a histogram. We have found that narrow and tall distributions sound much better than wider, shorter distributions, even if the majority of the jitter is in the 50psec range. This makes perfect sense, since the jitter of a thin distribution is bunched in a tight range and not varying widely on average.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

The Offramp and Dynamo together jumped the performance of my Lampi and digital front end at least 50%.

Shawbros might argue with you but I believe it. Dynamo means non-chinese walwart ps?

The DAC is important, very important, but what it is fed is perhaps more important. I will make a bold statement here. I bet my Lampi 4/4 with the Offramp/Dynamo sounds better than a Lampi 5,6 or 7 with no Lampi or Offramp transport.

I am glad you have finally been converted. I made that same statement earlier in the thread and you actually argued with me. Your modded mini was king at the time.:)

This is what I say on every forum. The jitter of the digital source is MORE IMPORTANT than the DAC. It's true. And Empirical Audio has been developing lower and lower jitter products for more than 15 years.

One could argue that any dac worth its salt should be able to process jitter much like old school engineer types who say that any well designed power supply should not need power conditioning.

Steve, the Ifi crew claims lower jitter specs than Offramp at a fraction of the cost (http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2013/04/amr-ifi-announce-ilink-usb-spdif-converter/). Any comments?

Transports and jitter busters aside, you can not turn the chinese dac du jour into a Lampizator 7 with jitter management....:)

"Steve, the Ifi crew claims lower jitter specs than Offramp at a fraction of the cost (www.digitalaudioreview). Any comments?"

I don't know where they get this. Send me an iFi and i'll publish the jitter distributions of OR5 and iFi.

In the end what matters is how the device sounds when connected to a DAC, not how it measures when connected to a test system anyway.

I don't see any iFi things taking best of show at Newport or RMAF. They have their pricepoint and I have mine.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Grannyring,

If you buy a modded DVD player from the Lampi shop of just buy the digi-Lampizator kit 100euros and add to say a Denon DVD3910, you get astounding performance. Myself, I have just the Spdif modded Denon (no digi mod) and i disabled all the video sections, etc. Best spinner I have.

I also use a stock Duet with upograded caps and deicated LPSU and that is great.

Point is jitter is only half the story. Power (waveform distortion) is the other.
I think its too much to say low jitter is the end all and be all of good sound. Its important, yes, but not all.

Many ways to skin a cat.