I too have a fairly analytical/engineering/scientific approach to life, and like to think I can see through the smoke and mirrors in most cases. But there are plenty of folks here who have a lot more actual engineering experience in the audio field than I have (not difficult!), and there are often very plausible explanations for some of the effects reported here, but it's nigh on impossible for us mere mortals to work out whether those perfectly plausible effects will have any impact on what we hear, or whether they are irrelevant by orders of magnitude.
As an example, I can believe that the use of an external DAC means that only jitter (from whatever source, cables, power supplies, software processes etc) and maybe electrical noise can affect the performance of the DAC (and if we use Toslink can we rule out electrical noise?). But what seems to cause confusion is just how bad the jitter has to be before a) a receiving/reclocking circuit in a DAC can't cope any more, and b) in the worst case where a DAC transfers all of that jitter to the analogue output, it becomes audible. I also can't guess what the likely 'sound' of that jitter would be. Is there any reason to expect that it could have more of an effect on the bass than the treble for instance? The SBT software modding seems to be all about reducing jitter as far as I can see, and it seems to me that the reason the subject has any sort of credibility at all is because none of us can be sure how important jitter is or what it sounds like. That's surely an area of uncertainty where myths can breed. -- chill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10839 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=92918 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
