You know, if you create a listening environment that omits that gaseous compound entirely, it is reported that you can avoid any unwanted acoustical room effects. You can also save a fortune on speakers and associated electronics, since every brand sounds exactly the same under these conditions. Unfortunately, there are some unfortunate occupant side-effects that may have a low WAF...

I myself find that I couldn't listen to my sytem without the Marigo Dots and the X-coordinate pen .

I wrote that I want to be a beta tester for the 997 with my X-Coordinate pen on the plactic film and it automatically transferred to this forum message. I hope PeterT understands the message.

Youse guys are just plain silly :rolleyes:

Tunage through TUBEage is the Real Deal!

I've read that optical S/PDIF can result in more jitter than coaxial S/PDIF, but never seen any proof of this. But this has led some people to prefer coaxial over optical.

The nice thing about optical is you're guaranteed to decouple the source and receiver. But a well designed coaxial input will do this anyway.

I think any optical<->coax converter would have to be an active device. And could increase jitter even though the digital signal itself would be the same.

Most digital interface receivers now perform reclocking to received digital bitstreams, so any jitter present is automatically removed. This applies to Toslink an S/PDIF coaxial. Jitter is not really an issue anymore.

(I was writing my post while Altec stepped in with the answer I was pointing toward.)

Digital equipment designers and engineers … a question:

In the receiving of digital information by many types of digital equipment, does not the incoming digital information enter a buffer before being fed for manipulation and/or analog conversion? And does not the play-out from the buffer of that digital stream, before conversion, depend on an internal clock in the receiving equipment?

If so, and if the incoming information was captured properly in the first place when placed in the buffer, then the degree to which digital jitter affects the quality of the analog signal depends not on the digital time-stability of the source device’s output nor any jitter effects introduced by a cable or other means, but on the quality of the output from the buffer, through processing and the DAC, based on the clock and electronics within whatever piece of gear finally converts the digital source to analog. Can we say that if the incoming signal had less jitter than the subsequent processing and DAC, any advantage of the ‘better’ incoming digital stream is lost? Can we also say that if the incoming signal had more jitter than the internal electronics of the processor and DAC, as long as the incoming information was properly captured, that the disadvantage of the arriving ‘worse’ digital stream has been made irrelevant?

In other words, is it not true that as long as any digital signal degradation does not exceed the ability of the receiving equipment to capture information properly, the last piece of gear in the process, the one that finally takes the digital information and turns it into analog, determines how much or how little jitter is introduced and any effects this has on the final signal?

Yeah, phase-locked-loop itself should take care of it.

But for reasons I don't yet fully understand, the eye diagram is something that shows how jitter on the signal can still affect the resulting re-clocked signal, because of limits on the reconstruction.

From this article, A second look at jitter: Calculating bit error rates , which I only skimmed, I think they're explaining how jitter can create a sampling error because the signal isn't actually the simple curved line it is usually drawn as.

In other words, getting the right value into that buffer in the first place might go wrong. A perfectly synchronized sender and receiver might sample incorrectly by chance, because of noise in the signal itself, and jitter increases that probability.

Like I said, jitter is not an issue anymore. Worry about bigger fish.