What does "jitter" sound like????

Now that the DAC's have gotten so much better in the last few years it is much easier to hear the differences in the overall quality of trhe digital signal coming from various transports. Jitter is not the only thing that can cause poor sound from a transport. In my experience most older transports have poorly designed, poorly regulated and poorly filtered power supplies. These power supplies and their associated digital circuits put a far amount of eleictrical junk onto the digital output. However, and usually more importantly, many digital units put a tremendous amount of noise back on the AC lines where it can pollute other pieces of equipment. This is easily demonstrated with a noise sniffer or Oscilloscope. Your Studer, being a pro audio unit from a company known for its fanatical attention to engineering detail probably has a well designed power supply. That said, a jitter reducer like the Theta TLC which I use to isolate my digital satillite using the ATT glass output might make it sound even better. Carefully isolating the AC power supplies from one another also probably will improve your overall sound.

There seems to be a LOT of misinformation going around about digital. There are different "types" of DACs. When I say DAC, I'm referring simply to the converter which is a chip that converts digital input to an analog output. In addition to DACs for CD playback, there are different DACs and DAC Arrays for commercial use. Many of the so called improvements in DACs are really just ways of producing cheaper DACs. The DACs used on most mass-produced CD players and portables costs about 20 - 25 cents each. So called jitter reducers may not reduce jitter at all. It depends on the sysytem. Most well mated Transport-Processor systems will have a small enough quantity of jitter so that jitter reducers will have no effect or make it worse. I've measured Theta, Spectral, Levinson and a few others and they all had better jitter numbers without any intervening devices. Any claim to produce zero jitter is not to be believed. The device measuring jitter has jitter itself. It's an anomaly of the digital domain. I remember Robert Harley reviewing the Genesis lens in StereoShill and being shocked that different transports still sounded different with this product. This showed me how little these guys really know about audio.

OOps I almost forgot. The data format on CDs is not the same as computer ROM disks, and the data retrieval is much less reliable.