Shadorne...If a cable causes a pulse risetime anomaly (such as a spike) it will happen for every pulse. All will be delayed or trigered early by the same amount, so jitter is not the result.
What if the shape of the leading edge changes according to the signal pattern.
"Most digital audio links have a limited bandwidth. This attenuates the higher frequency components of the digital audio interface signal, and slows rise and fall times. A transition delay is introduced, and this varies depending on the data pattern in the previous time slots."
See this
paper for more details.
This is probably why Ed Metiner uses "preamble jitter" for clocking, as preamble jitter is usually less. At the end of the day, since interface jitter is a fact of life then the best approach is to design a PLL clock that does not "jump around". So in the end, it is the quality of the PLL loop in your receiver that will determine how well it maintains sychronization whilst making a steady and unjittered clock. (The simplest approach being asynchronous - the data is passsed to the receiver digitally in perfect form and then receiver does D to A with its own superbly accurate clock)
The paper concludes "Digital audio equipment has to be designed to cope with jitter from its synchronisation source, as this is a characteristic of the interface. This is particularly important for the recovery of sampling clocks from interface signals."
Therefore either
One has equipment that is well designed and which can cope with jitter and all decent quality cables will all sound the same (jitter below audibility).
or
One has equipment that is not that great at rejecting jitter and cables and anything might make a subtle difference...you can blame the cables but in the end, since jitter is a fact of life - it makes more sense to blame the equipment.
Much of the jitter problems come from power supplies - so if you can clean up the power then it may be enough.
Once again - you'll notice a common theme with my posts - I tend to blame equipment or equipment interface issues for observed differences in quality rather than the interconnects and cables. (In a sense one cable may work well with one setup but not at all in another...a lot depending on the gear quality.)
Since jitter has been well known since the late 80's early 90's - my suggestion (for those who are worried that they are getting digital hash from jitter)is to
1) stick to gear made after 1995 or later (once manufacturers got robust PLL loops working well that could handle all this jitter).
2) use asynchronous approaches (like a USB DAC)
3) consider a reclocker - particularly with older classic digital gear that might be expected to be rather jittery (you know older stuff that does not upsample etc. before the engineers go their heads round all this)
