Jitter stew

[Cosmik]

... it was a pretty miserable low class sound, that ticked many boxes technically, but failed to deliver 'musicality', however you wish to to understand that term.

This has not been demonstrated to me scientifically. People regard some of the recordings of the time as audiophile standards.

Early CD players were cosmetically revolting - it would be difficult not to have one's perception of the sound influenced by the flimsy, cheesy, plastic buttons and mechanisms compared with the beautiful vinyl technology that was common at the time:

It was always going to be difficult to give the small shiny discs the right vibe for audiophiles.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Well I did use a Pioneer Elite Laserdisc player as a transport for a few years because it was heavily built and not light weight, had nice real rosewood end panels that matched my speakers and a separate center drawer for the CDs to go in it. Ample programming abilities for playback and a nice display that was more useful. Seems like it was a $2000 plus device new, and I had someone trade it to me as laserdiscs were fading fast.

 

[Cosmik]

There is no asynchronous CD player.

I would think that a PC playing an audio CD or WAVs from its internal CD ROM drive, feeding into an asynchronous USB DAC would clearly fit the description "asynchronous"..? Wasn't Amir saying that Meridian CD players are basically like this?

But why are people getting so hung up on the words themselves? Synchronous, isochronous, asynchronous. Parts of systems may have elements of all of these, but that doesn't detract from the two major types of overall system:
1. Any system that has more than one sample clock within it, where the difference between them has to be accommodated somehow. There will always be 'jitter' at the output due to this, but it might be a tiny, tiny adjustment every six hours - not even measurable and certainly not audible. But it might also be a constant, measurable level of jitter in other systems. In these cases, a USB cable could be a factor in the performance.
2. Any system where there is a master clock, and everything is slaved to it. In a modern hi-fi system, the clock may reside in the DAC, which makes sense because having it in close proximity to the DAC will minimise the jitter that reaches the analogue output. In these systems, USB cables don't have an effect*. Controversially, as discussed earlier, integrated CD players have always been this kind of system, but any 'audiophile' system that uses ordinary S/PDIF or TOS to link a transport to a DAC is of type (1).

Edit: perhaps the terms "loosely coupled" and "tightly coupled" would be useful in some cases.

* Of course everything has an effect, but the system can be designed to make it *zero* except for trace electrical noise coupling, etc.

 

[Old Listener]

Trouble is, the "almost-irrelevant other minutiae of engineering" is where digital playback breaks, or works, from a subjective viewpoint. 25 years ago, everyone who had aspirations for quality sound poured vast amounts of poo upon digital, it was close to a universal attitude amongst the cognescenti - and listening to the specimens around the traps one could understand why - it was a pretty miserable low class sound, that ticked many boxes technically, but failed to deliver 'musicality', however you wish to to understand that term. This was a curious situation for me, because I knew how good digital replay could be, but virtually no-one was experiencing it at the time.

Things have been changing rapidly recently, and many people have "seen the light" - I see the chance for major movement forward; the "battle" between analogue and digital is largely yesterday's news.

You don't speak for everyone. I waited a few years to take the plunge with CDs. Easy to wait since the music I wanted to hear came out on CDs slowly. I'd had 20 years with LPs before I got a CD player and knew how they sounded. I didn't find CD sound to be miserable or that CDs "failed to deliver 'musicality'". CDs did fail to deliver all the things that compromised real world LPs: compressed dynamics, wow and flutter, off center holes, noisy pressings, locked grooves and warping so bad that the stylus went airborne on every rotation.

My wife and I had about 350-400 LPs at our peak. We have about 3000 CDs now and a fair number of downloads. All that music is stored all on computer hard drives and accessible on our computers and portable music players and in cars. We listen to music more than we ever did in LP days and enjoy it more.

If you still can't enjoy music in digital form, you have my sympathy. You don't have my agreement.

 

[amirm]

I invested in CD player about a year or so after the format was released. Bought a Technics CD player and immediately threw out all of our LPs. As Old Listener said, I was finally free of all the LP limitations which bothered the heck out of me. And the random access was fantastic. It all provided a big boost over my LP to my system. Now, I did not have a high-end LP setup but I hear all of those problems on super fancy turntables even today.

 

[Wayne]

As Old Listener said, I was finally free of all the LP limitations which bothered the heck out of me. And the random access was fantastic. It all provided a big boost over my LP to my system.

I second that. I like my music when I want it. Never liked changing the LPs just to get one song (or work) that I wanted to listen to, and just as I was relaxing, had to reset the arm or change LPs.... broke the mood. I will live with the negative issues that digital has for its advantages. I took the easy (lazy?) way and put all my CDs (approx 1,000) on to a computer HD, then to a DAC and then to a powered (active) speaker. Not a perfect set-up, but it works for me.....

 

[Frank Dernie]

I enjoyed CDs from the outset, Nimbus issued fabulous recordings IME.
As a mainly classical music listener I was, in any case, used to listening to whole works, not skipping about tracks, so the big benefit of CD was getting most symphonies onto one disc, a big benefit for me.
I have 4 record players, all sound different and don't get used much but I am not selling all my old LPs!
Not a fan of file based music due to the lack of any useful standards.

 

[Purité Audio]

CD always sounded good to me, I remember that first time ,the absence of background noise what a revelation and so convenient!
Keith

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

DCD is a deterministic jitter, so it will be wise to stop praising buffers like often see in this site.

I do not follow. Do buffers cause DCD? Aren't there also buffers in everything like reading from the disc through the entire digital playback chain to the DAC chip itself regardless of transmission protocol? You are not suggesting the elimination of buffers, I hope and trust.

Also, asynchronous protocols do not necessarily have more buffers. They simply allow for logic and two-way control of filling and transmitting data out of the buffers. This allows final control of timing of the data flow to be done entirely by the DAC master clock rather than the player clock.

 

[amirm]

DCD is a deterministic jitter, so it will be wise to stop praising buffers like often see in this site.

Have not seen such praise for buffers. Indeed I am always quick to say a buffer solves no jitter problems. It simple is a holding place. Whether there is or is not jitter depends on how the clock is generated.

As to deterministic jitter, it only matters if it bleeds to the output of the DAC. And if it is audible on top of that. Do you have examples of DCD jitter on USB bleeding to the output of the DAC?

 

[RayDunzl]

What's DCD?

ooh...

http://ransomsnotes.com/index_htm_files/RansomStephensJitter360Pt3AllAboutTheAcronyms.pdf

 

[Cosmik]

What's DCD?

ooh...

http://ransomsnotes.com/index_htm_files/RansomStephensJitter360Pt3AllAboutTheAcronyms.pdf

A very comprehensive document! All of the myriad jitter types mentioned are present in all digital audio implementations. But in a system that buffers the data and uses feedback to regulate the amount of data to the DAC's sample rate, the only jitter that reaches the analogue output is the jitter within the DAC's sample clock. Unless there's a gross fault, cable characteristics, eye diagrams, etc. are not relevant.

The effect of the jitter in the DAC's sample clock will be 'noise' added to the desired signal - that reduces in amplitude as the signal reduces, so it is always 'masked'.

I go back to the idea that if the noise level is so low that it is way below the ambient noise in the room, and below the human hearing threshold, below the acoustic emissions from the power supplies in the amplifier and DAC itself, or below the level of Brownian motion of the air molecules, perhaps it is not worth worrying about any further..? I don't know if it is less than all of those things, however, but I presume that they can be estimated..?

What I do know is that there is no DAC that is free from the effects of jitter. You just have to keep zooming in and you will find it. The only way to be sure it isn't worth zooming in any further is to quantify its amplitude relative to the signal and other sources of noise. It may be that the average $2 module already exceeds the required performance by a wide margin.

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

Not sure about the $2 module, $20 maybe, but otherwise your opinion makes a lot of sense to me.

 

[fas42]

If you still can't enjoy music in digital form, you have my sympathy. You don't have my agreement.

Well, I enjoyed CDs too when I got my first system with such running - I managed to make a few smart moves straight off: top of the line player, extremely simple setup - CDP, power amp, speakers; nothing else. And I started tweaking straight away ...

Listening to everything else that was out there, as I steadily improved my rig, made me very much aware of how most hit a quality barrier fairly quickly - I learned to recognise that non-optimised "digital sound" has a signature just as strong as pops and crackles, wow and flutter in LPs. Fair less obvious, but once removed and then heard again it can be as irritating and unsettling as anything in the vinyl world ...

 

[amirm]

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” A. Einstein.

 

[Old Listener]

Well, I enjoyed CDs too when I got my first system with such running - I managed to make a few smart moves straight off: top of the line player, extremely simple setup - CDP, power amp, speakers; nothing else. And I started tweaking straight away ...

Listening to everything else that was out there, as I steadily improved my rig, made me very much aware of how most hit a quality barrier fairly quickly - I learned to recognise that non-optimised "digital sound" has a signature just as strong as pops and crackles, wow and flutter in LPs. Fair less obvious, but once removed and then heard again it can be as irritating and unsettling as anything in the vinyl world ...

Nice rhetoric but not convincing. I've never heard anything as irritating on CDs as a locked groove on an LP with music I really want to hear. A badly warped record that causes the stylus to lift off on every revolution is just as irritating.

After almost 50 years of listening to a recording of the Beethoven violin concerto by Grumiaux and Galliera, it remains my favorite recording of the work. However, the LP had some serious flaws. There was audible tape hiss (a bit more than normal for recordings of that era) but the LP surface noise greatly reduced the S/N ratio. When a CD version came out, I bought it and was very pleased to find that it had a much more normal S/N ratio. Once I listened to the CD, it was impossible to listen to the LP without being dismayed by the surface noise.

I cited several flaws of real world LPs in my earlier post. Years later, I still remember one or more examples of each of those flaws.

I have yet to be irritated by non-optimised "digital sound". I guess that I haven't spent enough money on gear.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Nice rhetoric but not convincing. I've never heard anything as irritating on CDs as a locked groove on an LP with music I really want to hear. A badly warped record that causes the stylus to lift off on every revolution is just as irritating.

After almost 50 years of listening to a recording of the Beethoven violin concerto by Grumiaux and Galliera, it remains my favorite recording of the work. However, the LP had some serious flaws. There was audible tape hiss (a bit more than normal for recordings of that era) but the LP surface noise greatly reduced the S/N ratio. When a CD version came out, I bought it and was very pleased to find that it had a much more normal S/N ratio. Once I listened to the CD, it was impossible to listen to the LP without being dismayed by the surface noise.

I cited several flaws of real world LPs in my earlier post. Years later, I still remember one or more examples of each of those flaws.

I have yet to be irritated by non-optimised "digital sound". I guess that I haven't spent enough money on gear.

You know I have some LPs recorded on metal tape using a Nakamichi deck. I am not so sure that deck with Dolby C didn't have a larger performance envelope than LP anyway. It most definitely was better than my Revox RTR except at 15 ips and even then there were tradeoffs. The full flavor of the old LP recordings comes through it seems now after all these years. I am not quite as bothered by LPs issues as some. I can listen and enjoy many recordings even with surface noise a bit of wow and warp sound. One of my friends heard my first Magnavox CD player, hated the sound of surface noise and warps on LP, loved piano music, and immediately ditched all LP related gear and bought a CD player. He was hypersensitive to all those LP issues even when he had nothing without them to compare. Hearing the perfect speed of the CD it simply was a no brainer for him and all LP was gone from that moment on.

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

You can call me stupid if it fit your theory Mr science

Forgive me if perhaps English is not your native tongue. But, what is with the wise guy trollism? If you have something meaningful to say, say it. Otherwise....

 

[amirm]

You can call me stupid if it fit your theory Mr science

When you post a random Einstein quote, you get one back in return. Nothing more.

Your one-liners are not helpful or constructive anyway. I don't even know what point you are trying to make or which side you are on. Take the time to write a meaningful post. I mean look at your OP. What kind of thread starter is that???

Here is your chance. Write a paragraph and explain why you created this thread and what your position is in all of this.

 

[Thomas savage]

My quote was not calling anyone stupid, I could call you ignoranus which is an ignorant asshole but I didn't.
Enjoy your site no need to ban me I'm off.

go pick up a copy of this ..,

I think we can reliably assume you are not one of the 16 million who have already bought a copy..