DAC improvements slowing down?

Its not these technologies that will deliverthe best DACs, its clever design that reduces jitter, eliminates computer dependency and reduces noise and distortion. These are much more important than 192 versus 96 versus DSD.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

BBC studies are worthless IMO. They need better system and trained listeners as well as good quality tracks. I doubt if they had any of these three.

I have made improvements in the jitter of my products on the order of 30psec P-P and easily heard the difference.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Like I said, they need a better system and trained listeners as well as good quality tracks. I doubt if they had any of these three. The results point to that.

Also, the nature of the jitter is important. If they are generating random jitter, then this is not at all like the jitter in real audio systems. It is usually correlated in some way.

Jitter has three attributes:
1) amplitude
2) frequency
3) distribution

All of these are important and not just one measurement. They all vary with each other.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Scvan - until you experience really low jitter, you will not understand. It is never low enough IME. I perform jitter demonstrations at nearly every trade show, as well as contrasting the sound of AIFF, ALAC and FLAC with wav files. Every single attendee hears the difference.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Lew - I tried a Femtoclock and even designed a module for it with regulators etc. It didn't measure any better than my previous clock module. It may have lower jitter at 20MHz, but this is not important with audio.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio