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



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