Jim wrote:

I don't keep up with the "hot" subject in audiophile techno-babble as
much as I used to, but "jitter" was once a biggie.

Come on now: were are talking about phenomenon that occurs on a scale
of NANOSECONDS (billionths of second). Electricity (and therefore
electrical signals) moves at a rate of about 1 foot per nanosecond. From
all the graphs that claim to measure this phenomenon it appears that it's
not a cumulative thing; and even if it was how many billionths of a second
have to add up before you can hear the effect??

If the receiving circuitry doesn't have a nice stable phase-locked loop that
rejects the input jitter, the timing error is analogous to an error in the
amplitude domain. If you're clever at information theory you can indeed prove
this fact.

SPDIF bit period is around 350 ns @ 44.1kHz samplking rate. So jitter of +/ 1
ns for example would be an error of 1 part in 350, or about -50dB ref full
signal.

That's a lot of error.


Graham