You are giving him more credit than is merited Don. We don't know if Mike has improved the jitter output of the DAC at all since he has not provided any measurements of that. He is
assuming that because he went bought some good parts, that the whole system behaves that way. It is like someone putting better bearing on a wheel but not realizing that an out of round tire will destroy any benefit that might be there.
As you know, jitter is routinely induced into the DAC clock chip from other sources, not its own clock. And it is those deterministic jitters that could be problematic. As you noted, random jitter audibility is very high.
Here is a published paper on that:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/26/1/26_1_50/_pdf
View attachment 6676
As we see the
threshold is several hundred nanoseconds, not picoseconds and certainly not a fraction of that.
Analog formats like tape and LP have incredible amount of low frequency jitter. If such problems were not masked, no one would listen to analog.