Does the Benchmark DAC1 (or any DAC) eliminate all jitter?

[Il Mostro]

If you are thinking about the old player as a transport, you may to take a look an interface that re-clocks and reduces jitter between the transport and dac. Companies like Perpetual Technology, Audio Alchemy, Theta (and others) have made these. Monarchy Audio still develops and manufactures these devices.

 

[audioengr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pars /img/forum/go_quote.gif If you read that paper, the test setup used a laptop using files with software injected jitter, and then feeding the listener's own equipment via SPDIF. What if jitter in the SPDIF line completely masked any added jitter? Very poor design for an experiment IMO. No wonder Jocko and others aren't too fond of the AES and their "peer" reviewed studies

Agreed. Also, the contrived jitter was "random". This is not like actual system jitter that is audible. Its usually correlated to power supply or ground noise and may also modulate itself.

I've read a number of poor studies like this one. They prove nothing.

Steve N.

 

[SP Wild]

Ironically, it was the purchase of a high end jitter killing dac that exposed me to the debilitating effects of jitter. Its effects were beyond the resolving capability of my mid price dac - hence my lack in understanding of jitter. Thats how I felt about jitter.

I think you should get a dac and experiment with a PC to improve your jitter input and see if you can hear a difference. Thats what I did.

 

[Speederlander]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shuttleboi /img/forum/go_quote.gif Ok, let me change my question a bit. As I mentioned, I have a 10-year-old DVD player that works fine, but I want to upgrade. I have $1500 to spend. I have Denon D5000 headphones, and I listen to a lot of Radiohead and ambient lo-fi. Should I: 1. Buy a new high-end CD player (Sony's high-end SACD player looks awesome) 2. Buy the Benchmark DAC1 USB (This is the Benchmark model I want. I've also read that the headphone amp is great, in addition to the DAC.) 3. Buy something else. Recommendations, please?

$1500 gets you a Lavry DA11 with the USB input and a headphone amp as well. You can even go balanced if you want.

 

[plonter]

let's assume that the OP can actually hear the jitter,the question is if he gets another transport (that cost more money) it will give better results than his dvd player? if we are starting to talk about **,000$ transport here, I would say go for a nice dac and use your dvd as a digital transport. I used a 100$ pioneer dvd player at first to my dac, and it sounded great. later,just out of curiousity I upgraded to a marantz CD5001 cd player, and I don't think there are any differences regarding sound.

 

[nick_charles]

To the best of my knowledge there has never been any **properly controlled listening test**, anywhere, that has shown any evidence that jitter at any frequency or type has an audible effect at the levels found in commercially available kit (up to 14ns).

Benjamin and Gannon, who did use correlated jitter put the threshold at about 20ns for some frequencies and much much higher for others, at 20K jitter is a *theoretical* problem at low levels but , 1) There is not much happening relatively speaking musicwise at 20K, 2) masking, 3) the models for jitter audibility at 20K assume a signal that is 120db above the hearing threshold (Dunn et al) lol, 4) At 20K telling the difference between 16 bits and 15 bits is untrivial even for those with excellent hearing and 5) the B and G listening tests did not support this as a problem.

In another HiFi forum a chap created a jitter simulation and injected deterministic jitter into samples, after several weeks only one person was able to reliably (P< 0.05) detect 10ns of jitter and that only after extreme volume and repetitions. Nobody else could reliably place varying jitter 0 to 100ns amounts in the correct order !

I did it though by looking at the spectra and calculating the relative signal loss/degradation for each sample, even at 100ns it was pretty trivial.

There is much magical thinking and anecdote about how bad Jitter is, but this is simply not supported by anything remotely resembling good evidence , in the absence of such evidence jitter is just not something to worry about !