2. pc-audio
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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 1 response by nathanso

nathanso
25 posts
 
I use Winamp (on WinXP, using ASIO4ALL) to stream from my Sony laptop's toslink output into a plastic toslink cable to a Behringer SRC2496 DAC which then outputs to my system's preamp. I set the Behringer to use its internal clock. Behringer claims the SRC2496 has a "High-precision quartz clock generator [that] removes jitter and corrects off-tune, incorrect sample rates".

My question to the DAC experts here: Is there anything glaringly wrong with how I've set this up? Are there any easy improvements to be made?
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