highdudgeon Wrote: > Let's see...low jitter components in a revealing system. I suppose my > $9,000 Harbeth Monitor 40s don't count as revealing. Shame.
IMHO, it's less about how good/expensive your speakers are vs. how much care has been put into placement and making your room good acoustically. When I first got my SB2, I hadn't gotten my speaker placement quite right, and when I compared it (as a transport) against my reference transport at the time (a heavily modded Sony S7700, with 90% of the mods directly addressing jitter), I heard very little difference. I spent more time addressing placement and acoustic issues, and after I finally got it right, the differences between my SB2 and my reference transport was very clear...no other changes in my system other than speaker placement and room acoustics. > The Lavry essentially buffers incoming signal and eliminates jitter. > Therefore, whatever comes in from the Airport Express or the Squeezebox > sounds exactly the same...ONCE it has been processed by the external > DAC. My Dodson DA-218 DAC does the exact same thing. In fact, it buffers the input, upsamples AND oversamples it up to 768kHz, buffers it again, and then re-clocks the signal just before feeding it to the DAC chip with a clock that is spec'd at +/- 2 picoseconds. And despite all of this, it is *still* sensitive to jitter in the input signal. I had my Sony S7700 modded twice, both times the mods were targetted primarily at improving the jitter, and both times resulted in significant improvements in sound. How and why? I have no idea. I've talked with a number of engineers, and most have offered up that any Phase-lock-loop (PLL)-based design will be affected by jitter in the input signal, and the only real way to "solve" the jitter issue is via a Master-Slave distributed clocking system. Yes, at some point, worrying about jitter becomes a little unnecessary IMHO...IMHO, someone with a $30K dCS stack spending an extra $7K dollars on the dedicated Verona master clock to get the jitter spec down from 12 picoseconds to 6 picoseconds seems really ridiculous. Then again, if I could afford a $30K dCS stack without blinking an eye....! ;-) > And, having said all that...the SB and, for that matter, even the AE are > quite good in and of themselves. Again, read carefully: I said quite > clearly that for some music, and especially pop music, the differences > are marginal. A old Stones bootleg recording, for instance, is not of > the same quality as a careful recording of classical solo piano...where > the differences would be more pronounced. I agree with that. I love my SB2. I use my reference transport (now an Oracle CD1000 has replaced my modded Sony) for dedicated listening sessions, but to just have a good mix of decent-sounding music playing in the house, the SB2 is awesome (although I do recommend upgrading the power supply!) ;-) My overall take is that if you can hear the changes and the cost is worthwhile to you, more power to you. If it doesn't matter to you, then spend the extra money on some CDs (did I say CDs? On the SB forum???) or maybe some tickets to a live show... :-D > Jesus, Mary, and Joseph...why don't people stop to read before mouthing > off? I thought the discussion was quite civil.. :-) -- PhilNYC Sonic Spirits Inc. http://www.sonicspirits.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PhilNYC's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=837 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21628 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
