Hi Bolero, to be honest, I haven't tried Octave without Synchro-mesh (reclocker like AP2). My impression on Synchro-mesh is with my old Electrocompaniet ECD-1 dac. If you can wait, let me give a proper burn-in on Octave (it will hit 400 hours by this coming weekend), I will try feeding it direct with optical out from AppleTV (16/48) and report back. I fully expect it to be inferior, but I do not know how much.
To be honest though, if you have a less than ideal transport (PC, AppleTV, Sonos, SBT) with a sub $1k-2k dac, products like Off-ramp, AP2, Synchro-mesh will surely take the sonic performance to another level, regardless of how good jitter rejection is claimed to be by the dac manufacturer. Metrum doesn't have an internal clock. In 6moon review of Synchro-mesh, it does say the improvement is not noticeable with PS Audio PWD2, which has a very good internal clock.
To be honest though, if you have a less than ideal transport (PC, AppleTV, Sonos, SBT) with a sub $1k-2k dac, products like Off-ramp, AP2, Synchro-mesh will surely take the sonic performance to another level, regardless of how good jitter rejection is claimed to be by the dac manufacturer. Metrum doesn't have an internal clock. In 6moon review of Synchro-mesh, it does say the improvement is not noticeable with PS Audio PWD2, which has a very good internal clock.