Implications of Esoteric G-0Rb atomic clock

All of this sounds promising and something to look forward to. I'm wondering about any improvement here that can possibly address the limitations of red book brick wall filtering at the high freq. level , or will that still be the final impassable frontier to analog comparisons.

The very expensive Linn music servers use an ethernet connection to an NAS drive (as I understand it; i.e., quite imperfectly). Is this intrinsically superior to a USB connection, or is the interface irrelevant?

Chris, your question about repairing source material jitter involves a bit more complexity than what the Esoteric Rubidium is actually accomplishing. A good way to think of exotic reclocking devices (such as the Esoteric) is they are repairing the myriads of synchronization issues associated with the abysmal SPDIF connection. With a SPDIF's flawed approach, the clocking information is interleaved with the music data. The Esoteric Rubidium's incredible improvements seem to prove how poor the idea of interleaving clock information along with the music data has been all along! Of course, we can do this much more elegantly if we don't even try to interleave the clocking data on top of music in the first place. Can we say "USB" ;-)

Lapaix; Linn seems to be on the right track in choosing a high bandwidth connection. The ability for a DAC to be able to talk "back and forth" to the computer hard drive (while the music is playing!) assures a much better opportunity to achieve a perfect data tranafer to the DAC. It also is apparent that a standard USB connection easily exceeds the bandwidth requirements for the DAC to talk back and forth to the computer. Is Linn's higher bandwidth approach even better? I think the jury is still out here. I do know that the USB DAC I heard sonically eclipses Linn's best offerings by MORE than just a hair. Perhaps Linn should take a second look at the other parts within their music servers? If they can develop similar advancements elsewhere, the stratospheric pricing of Linn's music servers could be more easily justified IMHO.

Ehider, I agree that too few direct comparisons are made between RBCD and the benchmark of great vinyl when judging the performance of a CDP. However, I make this comparison every day, and have come to the conclusion that it is indeed possible for a traditionally architected CDP to equal or surpass an excellent vinyl front end. Moreover, as the CDP's analog section is critical, I would like to know more about the analog section of your USB WDP(Wet Dream Player).

Dgarretson; Ha! You really cracked me up with that 'WDP' moniker! I am not sure what I am allowed to say about the prototype USB DAC that I heard - The digital front end consisted of an Apple computer (that had the CD's transferred to it's internal hard drive via error correction) and it is connected to the DAC via a USB cable. The true proprietary information is not in my hands. It would be up to the designers to reveal once they launch this DAC sometime this year.