But yeah, my understanding is that jitter creates little minute versions of that sound, but correlated with the signal. Humans are very sensitive correlated noise, hence dither. It's subtle but it affects the experience.
Timing is critical to
all audio playback. But I do believe that time variations in an analog (physical) playback chain - as long as they are not ridiculous in duration - are much, much more tolerable to the human ear than truly miniscule time variations in a digital playback chain.
I'm listening to George Michael's "Mother's Pride" off the "Listen Without Prejudice" LP.
It sounds luscious. I mean, crystal clear and incredibly dynamic, with a virtually silent background. I would also say that I listened to Tay-tay's "evermore" on vinyl tonight, and it sounded even better, but I need to have plausible deniability that I listened to Taylor Swift, if I don't want ORT to get mad at me... j/k, buddy.
Even with millisecond-regime fluctuations in rotational speed, a.k.a. "wow-n-flutter", my Clearaudio Concept TT delivers a spectacular presentation of this album, without any worry about pico or nano or micro or whatever-seconds affecting the ability to re-construct a perfect sine wave through an extremely limited number of vertices that are exactly, perfectly placed in time.
By the way, the same FLAC "album side" (remember those?!?) sounds damned spectacular when streamed from Tidal, thru the AURALiC Aries G1, via Yggy. This is probably because Yggy was designed by Mike, who truly understands how to reconstruct near-perfect analog waveforms from limited data. But AFAIC, (affordable) digital ultimately cannot sound as good as this vinyl record does, via a similarly priced playback chain. Might be expectation bias on my part, but that's my prerogative, right?
I personally consume a LOT of digital audio, and in my system(s), it sounds really, really good. But it doesn't sound the
same as analog playback. While my digital system does not have an external rubidium atomic clock as a timebase... the fact that a system WITH such a device can sound ALMOST as good as a LP played over an analog reproduction chain that costs 1/15th as much... that's the deal to me. And, this may make zero sense because I've been drinking. I am especially careful lifting and lowering the tonearm when I am drinking.
But I feel strongly, regardless, About what? I'm not sure. Time for bed, likely. But it was a lot of fun, listening to vinyl, tonight.
I don't know about you but I'm not quite ready to drop $8K on a DAC! I'll put up with those character-building inconveniences of vinyl for now and probably spend way too much on records anyway, but hey, that's the fun. And you support local business if you're like me.
