Femto Seconds VS Pico Seconds.

[linnlingo]

The better Jitter clocks are now implementing femto seconds vs pico seconds. Have you found an audible difference in the change. Any graphs to show the difference.

 

[amirm]

Not at all. It is all a misguided journey. Our hearing is not at all sensitive to speed differences in that order. So how accurate a DAC clock is to that level is not material whatsoever.

What we may be sensitive to is variations in clock which them modulates the music and creates distortion components. Those variation do not depend on whether you have femtosecond clock or not.

The variations are caused by many factors, only one of which is the clock source itself. Unless measurements of the *analog* output of the DAC show clean behavior, a million times repeat of the word "femto" anything won't amount to real performance.

Indeed run any two DACs side by side and after a minute they will be out of sync with each other yet no one complains about DACs having speed variations. This is called "drift" by the way.

High-end DAC companies have popularized the notion of "femto clock" and now may people jump on the bandwagon.

 

[DonH56]

Aperture error is what leads to jitter specs for most of us. See e.g. this old thread: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/digital-audio-jitter-fundamentals.1922/ to see how much jitter matters. Note the amount of jitter to cause errors is related only to the signal frequency and dynamic range, not the sampling rate.

 

[svart-hvitt]

Not at all. It is all a misguided journey. Our hearing is not at all sensitive to speed differences in that order. So how accurate a DAC clock is to that level is not material whatsoever.

What we may be sensitive to is variations in clock which them modulates the music and creates distortion components. Those variation do not depend on whether you have femtosecond clock or not.

The variations are caused by many factors, only one of which is the clock source itself. Unless measurements of the *analog* output of the DAC show clean behavior, a million times repeat of the word "femto" anything won't amount to real performance.

Indeed run any two DACs side by side and after a minute they will be out of sync with each other yet no one complains about DACs having speed variations. This is called "drift" by the way.

High-end DAC companies have popularized the notion of "femto clock" and now may people jump on the bandwagon.

Didn’t the RME dac show better measurements after introducing the FS (femtosecond) version?

 

[Veri]

Didn’t the RME dac show better measurements after introducing the FS (femtosecond) version?

Better jitter measurements. Likely far from audible though.

 

[linnlingo]

So this is basically window dressing. What would you consider the major contributors to a superior sounding DAC over a mediocre sounding DAC.

 

[amirm]

Didn’t the RME dac show better measurements after introducing the FS (femtosecond) version?

That was the marketing label. In reality the old clock had random low frequency jitter. The other does not. This has nothing to do with whether the clock is accurate to femto or picoseconds.