None too dissimilar to the mechanics of the same-sex marriage debate, there are detractors: those who not only wish to hold tight to the comfort of their world view that bits are bits and that’s all that matters, but would also wish metaphorical fire and damnation on anyone who sees things differently.įor the sake of argument, let’s assume that electrical noise cross-contamination isn’t a factor in the quality of digital audio, that bits are bits and that’s all that matters. The latter’s internal oscillators, implemented to re-clock the incoming data stream, are extremely sensitive to electrical noise, which can easily disturb their timing accuracy. Look into its eyes: lights on, nobody home.Īlso influencing a DAC’s audible performance, perhaps to a degree greater than jitter, is the electrical noise (EMI/RFI) ingested by said DAC when umbilically connected to its source, often a consumer grade PC, to DAC.

Jitter causes D/A converters to perform sub-optimally, lending the resulting sound an emotionally distant quality. It comes unstuck when digital audio devices like D/A converters play receiver (point B) where the arrival timing of each bit matters bit-to-bit mis…timings are referred to as jitter. So too when sending a print job out over USB. If points A and B are computers seeing a file being relocated from one to the other, the ‘bits are bits’ logic holds fast. The corollary: if all binary data gets from point A to point B – and error checking mechanisms ensure it does – then data transmission is all that matters. Number 2? “It’s just ones and zeroes, mate”. It’s the number one mantra turned meme to infect mainstream thinking on digital audio.

Jriver review