esldude
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2001
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The vast majority of audio enthusiasts don't actually know what jitter is. But what they are told is that the product they are evaluating doesn't have it and that competing products have a detrimental amount of it. Some audio enthusiasts stop there and feel smart about themselves and their informed product selection. Others demand to be shown exactly how jitter affects output. Again they are presented with competing graphs - they are told that some look worse and some look better. They are told not to think about it too much, because it's far too complex to explain, but to use their ears. After all, what do we really know about jitter? It's like ****ing magnets, how do they work?
Yet there was still hope. A brave clan of enterprising young minds began secret investigations into the matter in the early twentieth century. Toiling away in secret labs of major telecom players of yore, your Ma Bells and your DARPAs, they discovered the secret lair of the jitter beasts. They fought valiantly and by the late 70s they thought they had defeated jitter through the advent of phase-locked loops. Alas, while they might have run the beast out of town, it was beaten and not dead. Jitter crawled its way to a deep dark cave to recuperate. There it was found by a group of trolls, some were withered husks of researchers who felt uncompensated and struck out on their own, others were trinket merchants looking for something shiny to peddle to the unwashed masses.
These trolls began to tell tall tales of the jitter beast having grown stronger than ever, of it hiding beneath the noise floor of the distortion graphs just waiting for an opportunity to strike unsuspecting listeners with its dreaded digititus. In truth the beast had licked its wounds and surrendered to a subsistence of scraps - a bad USB implementation here or an unstable crystal oscillator there. It no longer wished to face the fury of thousands of engineers grinding it down into the nether depths of Brownian noise.
Yet the villagers were scared, for each successive generation had been told of the monster by their parents. That if they were naughty and spent less than a thousand dollars on their transport the jitter would unleash the fury of a thousand Death Magnetics upon their ears. So the youngsters thought themselves wise and purchased jitter insurance from the elder trolls. Each one promised a lower period than the next - a nanosecond? Why you can get it down to a picosecond! A picosecond? Why with our current technology we can go femtoscale!
And so it was, perhaps in the same spirit of their right to bear arms that audio enthusiats purchased mighty DACs and Cables to whip the beast into submission (if they ever ran across it). Some would even hold championship contests where contestants would be sent into the field to see who could survive the beast's onslaught and be declared winner of the Snipe Hunt. The flaxen-haired golden-eared champions would pass their judgments onto the masses as sponsors of the order of the trolls, directing the purchasing decisions of puny losers.
Sadly the brave audio engineering knights had grown old and weary, they did not wish to fight a beast they knew had been slain, nor did they wish to interrupt or spoil the fantasy worlds of bright-eyed youngsters. Here we are -- everyone has heard of jitter but no one wishes to dust of the archival memoranda of the knights, for they know that as long as they spend enough they remain safe.
Even now I fear having told you of this ancient order, for I am but a simple bard who can't afford the Kingdom's tax on having an opinion. Even in this tucked away ghetto of sound science I fear the trolls will find me. Please, if I am no more after this post remember my tale.
Bravo!!!! Best thing I have read on jitter in long, long time.