What does jitter ACTUALLY sound like? (jitter test tracks)

[Bland_username42069]

A personal electrical substation and an atomic clock with interconnects priced at the standard square root of $(pi x price of preamp). Problem solved

 

[Roland68]

Does jitter exist - not if a manufacturer uses systems to mask it and it's artefacts (as many do) I have many DAC's and my ears and system(s) are living examples of what jitter does to music reproduction.

My ears don't live in an oscilloscope or on A3 frequency printout

In MY real world I am using numerous sources/routes and devices to establish which if any improve the sound stage, the 'blackness' the imaging and depth.

What I am finding as I work my way back to an acceptable standard of reproduction is that jitter exists, it causes the edginess in the upper register, smears the image and makes the bass 'woolly'.

Yes, it will result in some huge pushback but. When I dodge the streaming 'kit' being sold as audio nirvana (it isn't) with its compressed playback (bricking) and designs intended to mask the in your face, boring, tiring and less than believable reproduction it's hard to ignore the cause.

To that end I have sourced multiple routes and my system is geared up to provide optimal signals and reproduction (for me) with instant comparisons of kit, routes etc.

Simple example is one of my test tracks - 1985 Redbook - Polygram copy of Brothers In Arms - DDD - pressed in Berlin. Totally emotive, swaying rising and falling reproduction. Post 2000 streams - bricked. Pushed to eliminate nuances and music (from my opinion) and whilst many like it (who may not be aware of early digital recording.

jitter adds to the post millenium fatigue and glare with many high end manufacturers engineer their signals to mask as the drive is to sell streams and convince you all audio perfection has been reached. They call this Upsampling or Digital Filtering

The Mask: Many modern DACs use high-tap-count interpolation filters. This can make the sound "smooth," but it often does so by "pre-ringing"—essentially adding a tiny echo before the musical note.

The Result: This is likely what you’re (and I do) hearing as the "smeared image." If the timing of the leading edge of a note is blurred by a filter or jitter, the brain struggles to "place" the instrument in a 3D space.

The woolly bass and glassy highs - They are the classic signature of timing instability.

High-End Edginess: Jitter manifests as "sidebands" around high frequencies. It’s not a separate noise; it’s a distortion that is mathematically related to the music. This is why it causes "fatigue"—your brain has to work harder to separate the "glare" from the actual violin or cymbal.
Wooly Bass: People often think bass is too slow to be affected by jitter, but bass impact depends on the phase accuracy of the harmonics. If the timing is off, the "slam" becomes a "thud."

Blackness (noise floor v resolution)
A site might measure a -120dB noise floor with a static tone, but they aren't measuring signal-correlated noise.

• When the music starts, does the noise floor stay down? Or does it "pump" with the music?
• I use a device called a Monarchy DIP I use it with a high-quality transport AND 2 NAS sources. The Monarchy (still available if you talk to CC Poon) ensures that the "silence between the notes" stays silent. That "blackness" is what allows the depth and imaging I am talking about to emerge and amaze.

I've been hearing these kinds of claims for 35 years, and over 25 years ago we started investigating them.
These myths about significant differences due to jitter, different DAC ICs, conversion methods, reclocking, etc., are particularly prevalent with digital devices.

We've often encountered people like you during our controlled and externally supervised blind tests.
If the DACs weren't defective or exhibiting very poor measurements, these supposedly clearly audible differences were no longer perceptible in these blind comparisons.
In three cases, the guests insisted that the problem lay with our equipment, and we repeated the tests at their homes. And here, too, miraculously, these significant differences completely disappeared when no one knew which device was being used.

And that's precisely how the brain works for most people. The greatest deception and con originates from our own brains.

This doesn't mean that DACs don't have influences and effects, including audible ones, but these are always measurable.
We have compared well over 100 DACs across all price ranges, up to the high five-figure range, and haven't found a single instance where the audible results didn't match the measurements.

So, if you make such claims, please also name the devices where you observed something audible, so that we can compare them with measurements and, if necessary, test them ourselves.

Otherwise, your claims are nothing more than fairy tales intended to scare audiophiles, just like the fairy tales used to frighten small children.
And the commonality between the two is clear: they are simply fairy tales without any substance.

 

[Hayabusa]

Except the shooting was the other way around… goes to show: don’t bring a knife to a gun flight

You did not see the right movies

 

[dib80]

I've been hearing these kinds of claims for 35 years, and over 25 years ago we started investigating them.
These myths about significant differences due to jitter, different DAC ICs, conversion methods, reclocking, etc., are particularly prevalent with digital devices.

We've often encountered people like you during our controlled and externally supervised blind tests.
If the DACs weren't defective or exhibiting very poor measurements, these supposedly clearly audible differences were no longer perceptible in these blind comparisons.
In three cases, the guests insisted that the problem lay with our equipment, and we repeated the tests at their homes. And here, too, miraculously, these significant differences completely disappeared when no one knew which device was being used.

And that's precisely how the brain works for most people. The greatest deception and con originates from our own brains.

This doesn't mean that DACs don't have influences and effects, including audible ones, but these are always measurable.
We have compared well over 100 DACs across all price ranges, up to the high five-figure range, and haven't found a single instance where the audible results didn't match the measurements.

So, if you make such claims, please also name the devices where you observed something audible, so that we can compare them with measurements and, if necessary, test them ourselves.

Otherwise, your claims are nothing more than fairy tales intended to scare audiophiles, just like the fairy tales used to frighten small children.
And the commonality between the two is clear: they are simply fairy tales without any substance.

I appreciate the rigor of controlled testing, but calling it a 'fairy tale' ignores the specific technical bottleneck here: a 10-meter Toslink run. > Even a 'perfect' DAC cannot fix timing errors introduced by 10m of plastic fiber optics (modal dispersion). This isn't about the DAC chip; it's about the interface. I isolated the variable by using the same sources and the same Monarchy DIP re-clocker.

If one transport sounds grainy and flat while the other (Apple A1392) maintains depth and air through the same system, it points to a measurable degradation in signal integrity. I'm happy to name the device—the NuPrime W-100—and I'd be very curious to see its jitter measurements over a 10m optical run versus a standard 1m coaxial.

 

[dib80]

Oh great, yet another personal bias report on an utterly unexistent and solved topic... :-D

Wow. Yours is the ultimate irony of the "objectivist" argument: if every DAC and streamer sounded identical because the math is "solved," because the entire high-end audio industry is the most successful multi-billion-dollar mass hallucination in history.

May I suggest that you notify the audio press, all manufacturers are now out of business and their work towards solving a problem some can hear and manifests itself in a fatiguing and flat way.

But, clearly the $5 dac from BestBuy is as good as a $50k device from a dedicated manufacturer. Quick lads we can all save ourselves a fortune.

Personally, I prefer to believe my ears and not having to reach for the painkillers when fatigue sets in

 

[krabapple]

jjjiiitttteerrrrr ssssooounnnddsss lllliiikkkkeee thththiiiissss

Doesn't it?

 

[krabapple]

why on earth would it matter where a CD was pressed?

Back in the 1990s some (UK?) plants used faulty coating during manufacture, resulting in eventual 'bronzing' and 'CD rot' as the metal layer oxidized.
It was a real, though rare, thing.
It had nothing to do with 'bits is bits'.

Happily, it could be corrected by applying green marker to the edges of the discs. Problem solved!

 

[Chris A]

I didn't see a reference article to the audibility threshold of digital jitter--perhaps I missed it... Here is a 2005 article from the Acoustical Science and Technology journal (Japan):

"Detection threshold for distortions due to jitter on digital audio" - Ashihara et al.

The bottom line is that no one in that study could detect random jitter below 250-500 ns (i.e., 250,000 ps)--(see table 1). I don't believe that this subject (digital jitter) is an issue worth talking about further (...but that's just me...).

However, the equivalent of jitter distortion in loudspeakers is an issue:

Red Shift: Doppler Distortion in Loudspeakers

Recommended.

Chris

 

[voodooless]

@dib80 , citation needed for all of your nonsense.

 

[Chris A]

Sounds more like current "best practices" in the political arena to me...

For instance I just received this:

No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In

...etc., etc.

Chris

 

[mhardy6647]

Sounds more like current "best practices" in the political arena to me...

For instance I just received this:

No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In

...etc., etc.

Chris

And I, having received the same (via the NYT), posted it, posthaste, to the UFO thread -- where it seems to fit like the proverbial (if not rhetorical) glove.

 

[RickS]

Getting reports of AI and other rule violations and have confirmed. Locking thread while I administer.

A ban has been issued and some thread cleaning applied. Thread is open again.