Hi there,
I use an RME card as well. I'm using coax out. If you want to lower jitter, you should probably upgrade your card with a little daughter-card that RME sells that has a word clock out, and then get a DAC with a word clock in. (You can then run 2 cables between your RME card and your DAC -- one for normal SPDIF data as you have now, and the other for the clock signal) Then you can configure the RME card to be the master clock and the RME card will send a very high-quality clock to the DAC for it to use, so that the DAC doesn't have to get the clock signal the normal (jitter-prone) way, by decorrelating it from the digital data coming over the SPDIF link. The clock signal itself, when transmitted on its own cable, is very low bandwidth and does not incur any jitter of its own, so you basically eliminate transport jitter by using this approach.
Off the top of my head, I think the top-of-the-line Esoteric DAC has a word clock in, and I'd assume that most pro-oriented DACs as well as pro/home crossover DACs like some of the dCS and EmmLabs (ie. Meitner) models have them. You may want to check with RME for more details. I'm not a professional audio engineer so I'm just starting to figure it out myself, and looking forward to trying it here. :)
Regards,
Daniel
I use an RME card as well. I'm using coax out. If you want to lower jitter, you should probably upgrade your card with a little daughter-card that RME sells that has a word clock out, and then get a DAC with a word clock in. (You can then run 2 cables between your RME card and your DAC -- one for normal SPDIF data as you have now, and the other for the clock signal) Then you can configure the RME card to be the master clock and the RME card will send a very high-quality clock to the DAC for it to use, so that the DAC doesn't have to get the clock signal the normal (jitter-prone) way, by decorrelating it from the digital data coming over the SPDIF link. The clock signal itself, when transmitted on its own cable, is very low bandwidth and does not incur any jitter of its own, so you basically eliminate transport jitter by using this approach.
Off the top of my head, I think the top-of-the-line Esoteric DAC has a word clock in, and I'd assume that most pro-oriented DACs as well as pro/home crossover DACs like some of the dCS and EmmLabs (ie. Meitner) models have them. You may want to check with RME for more details. I'm not a professional audio engineer so I'm just starting to figure it out myself, and looking forward to trying it here. :)
Regards,
Daniel