Jitter free dac

I was searching on net, there i found this naim jitter free dac.Though i also considered that is not possible. But recent technologies with mind boggling ideas surprises sometimes


The First S/PDIF Jitter-Free DAC from Naim | Naim Audio

Marketing. Note the press release is from 2009 - fairly long back

Better option is to split your budget and invest in a good transport. This is easier with PC audio, where a good sound card or USB-SPDIF converter can be had for ~US$500. With CDs, you have to look for a good vintage player with a high quality transport and mod it.
 
Except for claims of "vanishingly low jitter", I really don't think there are any jitter-free DACs in the market at that budget.


Kinda OT:

When (actually if) I get the money saved up, I'd go for the AMR DP-777. They do claim Zero Jitter. And the designer (Thorsten Loesch) is a by-the-measurements guy, so I'd tend to believe the claims. But I'd be getting it not for those claims, but for how glorious it reportedly sounds: As analog as it gets. Sighhh...
 
Well right now I'm waiting for some clarification from AMR regarding the output impedance of the DP-777. It appears to be on the high side at 3k ohm. This coupled with a low'ish input impedance of 10k ohm in my preamp might lead to some bass roll off issues - not sure if it really is a problem though. The dealer/disty says he's never seen an issue of this sort with his clients but I'm not completely convinced. Mailed AMR, waiting for a response now.
 
I really don't know what to make of Jitter!

A lot of fuss is still made about jitter, but while it is potentially a serious issue it's rarely a practical problem these days simply because equipment designers and chip manufacturers have found very effective ways of both preventing it and dealing with it.

That is Sound on Sound, a magazine which I have, for years, been regarding as true to its name: very sound on sound. The these days of the article is 2008.

2008, problem sorted. 2013, everyone is seeking to escape from the serious and sound-damaging problems of jitter. What happened in those five years? The hifi-manufacturer-made, stand-alone DAC exploded onto the scene. Is there a connection? Is this a problem that the marketing men have resurrected just to be able to tell us that their product has it beaten? No prizes for guessing what the cynic in me says! Let us remember, that this is not something that is restricted to the engineering labs of audio companies: there is a vast amount of digital communication going on in the world, and the size and value of the non-audio digital industry probably makes the whole of the hifi industry look like a part-time chai shop. Isn't it the work, theory and practical, of those engineers that trickles out to other industries like hifi etc? Even if specific developments are subject to patents, the knowledge is there.

Actually, I wish they hadn't called it "jitter!" the word is too easy. It sounds like wow, flutter or flicker: words that exactly describe both the problem and its symptom, and the symptoms are easily detected by the sensitive ear or eye.

So what is jitter and what does it sound like? What it is is technical, more so than wow or flutter, etc, but not impossibly so: it is a timing error in the stream of bits arriving at the DAC causing it to mistake some 1s for 0s, or 0s for 1s, and this it is trying to reconstruct the analogue music from wrong data.

It is a timing error. But does this translate into a timing error in the music? Not exactly: if the music were to miss a beat we would have far worse problems that jitter! The error is in the bits, not the bytes. Like a spolling mistake in a word, the word is still there but some-how-not-quite-right.

An audiophile connects up a box, sits down, listens with a growing frown and announces: "It's bad! I can hear jitter!" What are they hearing? How do they know it is jitter, and not, perhaps, some incompetent design element or faulty component?

I have always been inclined to believe Sound on Sound. They are about studio and pro audio. They do not do the audiophile thing. Jitter had ceased to be a problem a decade or more ago. Nice, simple, end to the story.

But wait... If I search and dig, I can post links to articles by engineers which do not say that jitter was fixed and we should mostly just forget all about it. So, at the end of the day, I'm back where I started: I really don't know what to make of jitter!
 
I think we all agree that the term " Jitter-Free DAC " is a play with semantics. The ground reality is that Jitter is identified and understood much, much better today, than ten years ago. Hence most modern designers claim to reclock the incoming signal to vanishingly low levels, sometimes to even declare that the quality of the signal-carrying cable is a non -issue. In case you're targeting a DAC below 1L you may find the Dspeaker Anti-mode quite interesting. Veritable Swiss Army knife in Audio. Also includes DSP Room-correction.
 
I have always been inclined to believe Sound on Sound. They are about studio and pro audio. They do not do the audiophile thing.

Me too. I sometimes pick up the print mag. Always a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom.


Jitter had ceased to be a problem a decade or more ago. Nice, simple, end to the story.

Perhaps it was for the pro audio guys. Because a studio setup can afford to have a dedicated clock to synchronise all digital devices in the chain. Also, they used mostly AES/EBU interface, which - I think - was less prone to things like jitter.

In the home environment of that era, the only interfaces available were digital electrical coaxial S/PDIF standard or the optical TOSLINK. I believe even these interfaces were quite OK for short interconnects, but they were mostly shunned by pro audio guys, except for optical interconnects from computer (pro) sound cards to studio consoles (like the venerable Yamaha O1V console/mixer). In rare cases, people used Firewire to carry digital audio. It is a mystery to me why it wasn't more widespread, and why it has all but died out now. The USB seems to have supplanted it completely. Not too fair, I must complain.

The trouble started when folks wanted USB to carry digital audio. It wasn't really meant to carry audio. The only people who really licked the problems of USB audio were dCS. But as we know, their implementations were very high up in the stratosphere in terms of both complexity and cost and therefore it was not for the mass market audio enthusiast. Fortunately, over the years USB audio has improved by great leaps and bounds. The ubiquity of the interface was hard to ignore for audio gear makers. One can perhaps say that USB audio has come of age.

OT over.

Back to topic:)
 
The ground reality is that Jitter is identified and understood much, much better today, than ten years ago.

Given that these things are mostly researched and developed in the huge non-audo digital industry, that is one of the things that I am just not sure about. Was it? Or are we just being told that by the marketing dept? Audiophiles love to pretend that nothing exists outside the audiophile world: if we used wheels, then wheels would suddenly be something brand new, and hundreds of years of wheel development for transport would be forgotten. You can see this in the attitude of some people to PC sound, which is closely related to the whole DAC thing: one would not think that the PC is 30 or 40 years old and that good PC sound has been around for at least ten of those years.

jls001, I don't think you are offtopic ...or if you are, then I am joining you. One very important aspect of your post is that you are bringing the interface into the conversation. [As I understand it] jitter is not something that happens in the DAC, it is something that happens on the way to the DAC ...so perhaps we could say that all DACs would be jitter-free if they received a jitter-free signal? That makes sense to me, but perhaps It's technically wrong.

Firewire, by the way, is still very much alive in the pro/semi-pro market, although the is probably not much of it in devices suitable for domestic use. I have a firewire device. USB has only recently become a choice at the higher end of these devices. USB2.0 is considered so sufficient for even pro (many-channel) audio that it is unlikely that USB3.0 will ever see much use. That's the word on the street (ie forums that talk about this stuff): whether it is another "who will ever need more than 640K?" I don't know!
 
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When certain distortions are taken as flavored colors why not audiophiles take jitter also in colorful flavor...... :D
 
Well right now I'm waiting for some clarification from AMR regarding the output impedance of the DP-777. It appears to be on the high side at 3k ohm. This coupled with a low'ish input impedance of 10k ohm in my preamp might lead to some bass roll off issues - not sure if it really is a problem though. The dealer/disty says he's never seen an issue of this sort with his clients but I'm not completely convinced. Mailed AMR, waiting for a response now.

Thorsten Loesch is on Facebook, and quite active in some DIY and other HiFi groups (including one group, of which the Admin is FM Trittiya). If you're also on Facebook, you might be able to ask him directly also.
 
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