My Informal Jitter listening tests with a high jitter audio device... - Page 2

Yes, that is a fair point and I did have reservations about the TBAAM as a reference point. Frankly I was surprised someone did not pick up on that earlier. The SXLP240 has decent noise specs for a PCDP ~ 94db (with anti-shock off, worse with anti-shock on but not specified) .

If I wanted to do a tougher PCDP vs Soundcard test I do have an external Edirol a home which is rather better, in the end my office listening environment is just too noisy for critical testing as I did comment on later.

But, I took the PCDP home at the weekend and compared it against my proper home CD player which has far lower jitter and proper CD player type specs and also to an environment with much less noise.

I could not do level matched comparisons very easily due to the PCDP's
absurdly low output and the need to adjust the levels between players and it is hardly a scientific test. However, the egregious levels of jitter inherent in the PCDP (with anti-shock enabled) did not seem to translate to grotesque audible distortion compared with the CDPs.

Hardly conclusive I know, but it strikes me that if device A (PCDP) which has roughly 256 times the jitter (-55db vs -110db) of device B (CDP) is even close then maybe ultra-low jitter levels are not so important. Others have done the scientific tests on jitter properly and concluded the same.

If I get the chance this weekend I will digitize the analog feeds from CDP and PCDP and look at the waveforms, that should be more informative. Also I will do a anti-shock vs no anti-shock comparison. That should be interesting.

Not as interesting as anticipated

I did a couple of recordings from the line-out into Audacity, one with antishock , one without, level matched and time aligned. There were some slight differences, the anti-shock recording was a little bit compressed (dynamic range not subjective assessment) but at the same time it's frequency response plateaued at 18 K to 19 K then rolled off to 22K whereas the no anti-shock recording nosedived from 19K to 20K!, numbers wise the average peak and minimum levels were near identical and the waveforms were visually indistinguishable. A blind ABX (FooBar) showed I could not tell them apart. I used Foobar (16/44.1) to Edirol UA -1EX optical out to Entech 203.2 to M^3 to ATH AD700.