Jitter: It’s a good thing.

[ash_dac]

Originally posted by Bruno Putzeys
Indeed the slogan "perfect sound forever" was an incorrect appraisal of how digital audio works. It simply ignored that the signal had to pass A/D and D/A stages, which were anything but perfect. "The same sound forever" would've been closer to reality, though from a practical perspective not very true either.

Maybe the slogan should've been "The same sound forever, provided the same disc and CD player are used every time".

I'm not sure if the format would've gone anywhere with that slogan.

I laugh at the slogans on consumer gear:-

Some of the stuff on my equipment :-

'Mega Bass' :- it isn't bass unless it's mega!

'Super Bass" :- up there with mega

'Linear Phase Full Digital Processing' - nobody wants partial digital processing that just doesn't cut it!

In terms of formats I guess it's down to whatever the large corporations decide to back.


Fancy a dvd recorder? good luck !

http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/...sExplained.asp

Blu- ray, HD-DVD

Kind regards,


Ashley.

[Francis_Vaughan]

This stuff is so old and worn it is depressing. It must be at least 10 years that I have been posting on the rec.audio.hi-end newsgroup trying to dispel some of these silly myths. Nothing seems to change. Even the attitudes remain the same.

So, very quickly. The duality between amplitude and time is well understood in sampled systems. For many many decades. There is nothing special or new about the idea of dithereing with temporal jitter, and it is used in some sigma delta ADCs. No big deal at all. Notice that this at the ADC end. Dither is never added at the DAC end.

But there seems to be staggering mis-understanding amongst the innumerate golden eared. None of them seems to have anythinbg but he foggiest idea of how dither works or why it is used. There is pompous parotting of the scribbling of other golden eared fools who themselves misunderstand the mechanisms.

Once and for all time. Dither does not mask the quantisation noise. It is not a matter of drowning it out. It eliminates it. If you don't understand why, can't do the mathematics, which are mostly engineerring undergraduate level, there is little we can do. It is like argueing with someone who can't see about what colour red looks like. These people don't know enough to even understand why they might be wrong.