What does Jitter sound like?

-Impossible to quantify unless you can tweak the actual jitter specs in the same DAC/cdp.
-If a designer has taken the road less travelled in reducing jitter to minimal levels other areas of the DAC/CDP (power supply, filtering, analog section, isolation) are highly likely to be well thought out and complementary.
Dgarretson, I assume you did this test and only changed the clock to a low jitter clock circuit, while leaving any other component unchanged. If so how did you do this? did you actually measure clock skew and spectral analysis pre/post or toss in a super clock look at the marketing specs and just go for it?

Dpac996, these are my personal observations going from stock oscillator in my SCD-1, through three generations of Audiocom Superclock up to SC4. In each modification, only the clock (or the clock power supply) were changed. I installed each clock myself & made the comparison within hours of deinstalling the previous clock. There was immediate dramatic improvement, and further improvement over up to 200 hours of break-in. If this is just "going for it" then so be it. There is enough controversy about measured jitter that I'll go with the evidence of my ears on this one.

No real answers so far....hmmm...

I agree...it is all pretty vague. However in fairness there are infinite possibilities and (for those who bother to study this) that "masking" is a huge factor in our hearing ablity...and sounds in proximity to other louder sounds are often inaudible unless they are a fair distance in frequency from the loud sound (several octaves being a fair distance)....all of which means that certain forms of jitter may be much more audible then other forms with, for example, random jitter being quite benign (nothing to worry about).

Still,....the above sounds like a Presidential Debate.

Shadorne,

Many decades ago my doctoral and post doc training was in psychoacoustics, particularly binaural processing. The concept of "critical bands" refers to a limitation of the resolution of the auditory system and the interaction of auditory stimuli. Needless to say, I take much of the claimed auditory observations with a grain of salt. Many theoretical differences that justify large expenditures do not conform with auditory reality.

From a telelogical perspective, our auditory system must be generalizer, otherwise it wouldn't serve us well. So of course explanations of the sound of jitter will be vague. After all, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

db