Understanding Jitter in PC Audio


I have a fundamental doubt on the PC audio as a source. IN a traditional CDT/Dac combination we have a clock signal coming out in the SPDIF signal. Apologies if it sounds too silly but am planning of builing an HDD based transport as an alternative to my classe CDT1 :). was planning on a USB output from a dedicated PC and then use a good USB to SPDIF converter.

My Understanding is that in case of a HDD based transport, the File is converted into an Async format (Lossless) . This is then played via a PC/Mac and when given out as digital out, the clock that is synched to is the machines own clock (Am I right ?)

a) does this impact jitter of the Lossless file in anyway ? also what would the difference between an I2S and an USB interface be in this case as the clock is not really the original clock ?
b) Can the original information without any timing errors be reconstructed from this using an external reclocker like the empirical audio device OR Monarchy ?
c) If the clock is not present will an external DAC just assume the input to be as per its own clock. (If the rip were done by CDROM using the same clock freq as a DAc give any added benefit)
arj

Showing 2 responses by mapman

Audioengr,

Can you explain to me how re-clocking is done in an accurate manner?

I understand the concept of "garbage-in, garbage-out" in most information systems meaning that once information is lost or corrupted, it cannot in general be restored back to its initial correct state. It can be massaged perhaps to be better than it might be otherwise, but it will never be the same as it was before the corruption occurred in most cases.

So in the case of jitter, once the clocking of the data is hosed, how practically does re-clocking it make it right again or at least better. What algorithm is used? Is it that the correct clocking is just implicit in the sample rate of the bitstream assuming all the original bits are transmitted? If so, why bother clocking data in these crazy digital audio systems in the first place?

Thanks for any light you can help shed for me on this area that I continue to struggle with understanding clearly.