CD transport Question

[Scotty757]

If one is using a CD player simply for its digital output (coax or optical), how much can it really matter the innards of said player? If the output is simply 1's and 0's transliterated from the surface of a CD, is it really worth spending the money on a good player?

 

[Garbz]

Search for "Jitter" on this forum. This question gets asked about once or twice a week.

But the fundementals are that the integrity of the data is only one part of the problem. In the time domain in order for the DAC chip to perform ideally the data signal needs to arrive within a couple of picoseconds of the clock pulse, otherwise output artifacts are introduced. There's a myriad of causes for jitter some internal to the transport, some related to the DAC, and some related to interconnection, and worst of all there are no current methods which fix the problem and stick to the S/PDIF specification. But searching for it here will give you everything you didn't want to know on the topic along with a lot of arguements about how to get rid of it.