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Great white paper on jitter and clocking

amirm

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I just read through the paper. I think its early part about different kinds of clock and their generation is excellent.

On the later portions talking about external clocks, I think the wrong inference is being used. He is saying, "look, we designed this great clock for you, why are you wasting money buying external clocks???" He is doing that in a politically correct way as to not alienate their customers (Digidesign is one of the most popular platforms for audio editing).

As to people liking external clocking with more measured jitter, one very plausible explanation is that they may be imagining it. Their belly says that adding external clock with femtosecond jitter specs and such must make things better and that is what they hear. We cannot use their observations as true and then build a conclusion that people like more jitter.
 

Ethan Winer

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What he's saying is poor jitter performance can actually be subjectively preferred due to "euphoric distortions".
LOL, no, what I'm saying is that nobody can hear typical amounts of jitter at all. Not even you, and not even hear it enough to "prefer" the sound. Do you not understand what "jitter artifacts are 100 dB below the music" means? Further, jitter usually adds noise rather than harmonically related overtones that could be deemed beneficial.

jitter_noise.gif


If jitter really were audible, it would have been an even bigger issue years ago when tape recorders reigned. If you play a 10 KHz tone on an alignment tape you'll hear an astounding amount of jitter. This is caused by the tape repeatedly sticking to the playback head and then releasing. I'm talking about Ampex and MCI professional machines, not Teac home recorders.

--Ethan
 

Ethan Winer

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As to people liking external clocking with more measured jitter, one very plausible explanation is that they may be imagining it.
Well duh! :eek:

Amir, if I've learned anything from this new forum of yours, where science is held in high regard and subjectivist trolling is discouraged, you can never avoid the subjectivist trolling. (Hydrogen Audio does a great job in that regard, but they're a special case and not really a traditional public audio forum.)

--Ethan
 
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