On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Paul Winkler wrote: > On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 01:28:26AM -0400, Chris wrote: > > I'm a hobby hi-fi do-it-yourself'er and big into > > 'perfecting' my sound system and tinkering with electronics > > in general. One of the big concerns with digital audio of > > any source is of course jitter. Most purists would say > > that the digital out from a PC soundcard is absolutely > > horrendous and totally unfit for hi-fi due to this. My > > question is if anyone knows realistically what can be > > expected with your typical or not-so-typical digital-out > > cards: sb live, ensoniq audio pci, c-media 8738, etc. The
This topic is likely to end in a flamewar in any hi-fi related newsgroup, because it tends to be based on a mixture of subjective perceptions along with hard physical facts. My (honest) question would be: Did you ever _hear_ the result of jitter? Audio CDs aren't perfect and neither is S/PDIF, probably because they're from a time (late 70s) when an audio stream seemed like a tremendous amount of data, so that the engineers had to compromise. But after all, it's "just" digital data that's sent over S/PDIF. 16 bits make one sample, 44100 samples make one second of audio (with cd quality anyway), how can jitter degrade the sound if the D/A converter is aware of this? If high-end manufacturers want to address any problems that might occur, why don't they just add a suitable buffer to the receiving side (the D/A converter) so that jitter is only a problem between this buffer and the DAC? Or they could introduce an alternative to S/PDIF (e.g. USB), which is not so "weak" when it comes to error correction. The only answer I have found to this is that these solutions would be cheap, while big cables and a mechanically perfect audio cd drive are expensive. Don't get me wrong, I'm also really attracted by good (and good looking :) hi-fi gear. But this whole jitter discussion seems to me like an attempt of some manufacturers (and magazines) to measure differences in audio quality that are really only in their heads. > Well, the sb-live resamples everything internally > to 48 KHz, even stuff from the S/PDIF, even if it's already > at 48 KHz. So it's never a pure transmission. > I believe many other cards do this too, but I don't > know which ones. E.g. M-Audio's line of cards are said to be better in this respect, don't know how jitter-prone they are, though. Mirko _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user