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Digital Distortion

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Wombat

Wombat

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Is this what you are looking for?

Yes all the traditional analog performance parameters apply.

In addition parameters peculiar to digital systems.

Jitter which is noise from imperfect timing of samples. Comes from ADC and DAC use. Investigations into how much is audible put the number above a nanosecond. Other than HDMI or other odd situations of poorly done gear you are unlikely to run into digital gear with a nanosecond or more of jitter.

Low level linearity was a problem for multi-bit digital gear. The lowest bits weren't always translated into the right size signal. For instance a signal might drop in a file, but the output actually went up. That is also just nearly never an issue anymore.

Aliasing. This is when a frequency above the nyquist rate or half sample rate is reflected down into the audible band. It is caused by poor filtering. As an example maybe there is a high tone at 37 khz in a recording done with a 48 khz ADC. The ADC should filter out everything above 24 khz. If it has a half band filter or some audiophile minimum phase filter that isn't steep it may not. That 37 khz tone could show up at a low level as an 11 khz signal in the recording. There actually is a standard for measuring this in the AES 17 guidelines, but I have never seen anyone use it. I don't know what an acceptable number for a cutoff on audibility would be other than if this is low enough you can't hear it. Usually it is rather low or even below the noise floor.

Imaging is similar to aliasing only upon playback. It occurs with poor filtering in DACs. A high level tone at 11 khz with poor filtering might leak out a mirror imaged tone at 37 khz. This is less of a problem as such a tone would be low in level, you can't hear it at that frequency, and at low levels it is unlikely to cause other issues with your playback gear. Again there is a standard and I have never seen anyone list the results of this test.

Hopefully if I bungled any of this and said something stupid Don or Amir can correct me. There are a few other things a bit esoteric and just generally a non-problem. You couldn't find that info without doing your own tests I don't think.

So not sure how helpful this is other than saying if it hits good numbers on your regular analog parameters it isn't likely to be plagued by these other issues at audible levels.



Yes, this is helpful. Thank you.
 

Frank Dernie

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The traditional measurements at the analogue audio circuit output terminals are all that is needed to quantify performance of DACs - any negative contribution from the digital stage will be revealed thus?
I would have thought so. The only information going from the DAC to the amp and speakers is that coming out of its analogue outputs after all.
 
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