Jon, I'm not an engineer, but in speaking with engineers it seems to always come down to jitter (both data and timing jitter). And there are a lot of things that can affect jitter...the actual transport mechanism, the impedence matching between the output of the transport, the digital cable, and the digital input on a DAC, etc. What remains a mystery to me is (as highdudgeon points out) that if a DAC has a data buffer and a re-clocking mechanism, why would upstream jitter have an effect? I still don't have an answer for that.
FWIW, I mentioned in another thread that the difference between my SB2 and my reference transport was very minor in sound quality before I had had a chance to really properly treat the acoustics in my room, and that I only noticed a significant difference when I finally got the room treatments right. So the ability to hear the differences are affected by a lot of other variables. -- 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=22301 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
