OK, in case anyone cares, here's a (hopefully correct) explanation of how some components of jitter can be correlated with the frequency components of the analogue audio signal.
Suppose you digitize a 1 kHz sine wave with 16 bit at 44000 Hz (I know the CD standard is 44.1 kHz; more on that in a second). That means every 1/44000 of a second, you measure the level, turn it into a sequence of 16 bits, and send it out. After 44 such sequences you're back to where you started in the sine wave, since 44 * 1 kHz = 44000 Hz. So the digital signal will have an exact periodicity of 1 kHz, just like the sine wave, but its spectrum will be something complicated with lots of harmonic overtones and a huge peak at 44000 Hz (and probably 16*44000 too), because it's very far from a pure tone (it's something more like a square wave). However in real life (where the numbers are less carefully chosen) the situation is actually more complicated. Suppose you have that same 1 kHz sine wave, but the sample frequency is 44100 Hz rather than 44000. Then the (exact) periodicity of the digital signal is actually 100 Hz, not 1 kHz. You can see why that is if you think about it a bit, or from remembering about beating frequencies. So you now have lots of anharmonic frequency components (100 Hz, 900 Hz, 1100 Hz, etc) in there as well (and you'll still have a peak at 1 kHz, but probably smaller), and apparently that's the really nasty sounding part. So far I haven't mentioned jitter per se; the last piece to this is that apparently some of the jitter is correlated with the digital signal spectrum, and so that will pick up all this junk and pass it one into the analogue domain after D/A conversion, making your ears hurt. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24670 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
