Originally Posted by milkpowder
First of all, congrats on the new acquisition. I'm sure your (APS or SAA- recabled?) RS-1 will sound great when the Gilmore arrives.
While I tend to agree (though not from experience) that better transport will translate into better sound, I thought the DAC1 is advertised to be virtually immune to jitter. Benchmark posted graphs on Head-Fi and on their website showing how even artificially introduced jitter bore little impact on the
measurable performance of the DAC1. This leads me to think that jitter is only one of the aspects which may contribute to (or indeed take away from) listener pleasure, and used almost too often as a scapegoat for everything and anything not right about the sound. "Ah it must be jitter!"
you are correct, I am sure you know that there is no such thing as 'digital' per se, it is simply a modified square wave with 10-90% transition when switching either from '0' to '1' or vice versa. Assuming we live in a perfect world, that would be great because a measureable volt (within 10% of the steady state) is maintained for all your '0's and some other measurable volt (above 90% steady state) is maintained for all your '1's; so really the only major issue in the digital domain is clock sync (jitter as most like to call it). But that's not the case; the real world sucks. Let's say a crappy CDP is outputting something long the lines of 2mv 1.9mv, 2mv, and suddenly it dips to 1.7mv, and comes back to 2mv...well that would really suck because now instead of {1,1,1,1,1} you have {1,1,1,x,1}... granted there are ways to deal with this, mostly using a single parity bit and other technies such as those used in CD production, but is that what's really used in the DAC and transport?...that is, IMO, the real issue....
The conclusion of this analysis points to the reason why ethernet protocal is probably one of the best digital transmission means avaliable, hence my uhashamed plug for SD TP or really expensive digital cable
