Implications of Esoteric G-0Rb atomic clock

>I read some of the article but the price of the trio left me speechless.

Sure, but that's sort of beside the point. The technology, if worthwhile, should trickle down. What's important, I think, is what this product tells us about the problems with digital today, the merits of various claims being made about vanishingly low jitter, and what we may be able to look forward to in the future.

Rja, that's interesting. Which label? Are they good-sounding CDs?

It's a fascinating product review & survey of the jitter problem. If as Joe Harley observes, the ear can easily discern improvements in word clock accuracy down to +/-0.05 parts per billion (translating into jitter reductions on the order of tens of pico seconds), then it would appear that there's still a long way to go toward true SOTA in digital sound. Better clocks are far from an exercise in diminishing returns.

JH makes interesting observations. Unlike the crystal oscillators found in conventional CDP clocks, the rubidium-based clock in the Esoteric does not exhibit frequency fluctuations as a result of instability in the power supply. This correlates with my own experience that improving the quality of DC power into a VCXO Superclock greatly improves its sound. He recounts the luddite position of the Audio Engineering Society in the early 90's (opposing the very notion of jitter), and the gradual acceptance of the concept in the general community. He provides a nice working definition of the signature sound of jitter as "loss of space & depth; softening of the bass; hardening of timbre; a glassy sound on initial transients (most noticeably on the leading edge of upper-register piano attacks); a metallic sheen overlaying the treble; and an overall flattening of the soundstage & homogenization of instrumental images with the stage." Finally, JH notes that the rubidium clock option elevated the Esoteric P-03/D-03 well above the music servers that he had formerly favored over the Esoteric. Perhaps there is hope after all for ye olde compact disk.

Will jitter be an issue in the future if music is primarily read from music servers?

WARNING: There is a lot of marketing going on here. Please consider the fact that frequency stability is not the issue of Jitter! The issue of Jitter and how that distorts audio at the A/D process is a problem of each sample coming at slightly the wrong time. Frequency stability has nothing to do with this. A small example:

The numbers 3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3 average out as the number 3.

The numbers 2,4,2,4,2,4,2,4 average out as the number 3. (This is as simple as 24 / 8 = 3).

The numbers 1,5,1,5,1,5,1,5 also average out as the number. (This is as simple as 24 / 8 = 3).

However, were these Jitter deviations from perfect timing (fluctuations from the ideal value, which was in this example, 3) you would have had worse and worse audio going down the line.

The marketers of all three pieces of equipment in the above example could easily all have said the same thing without lying: "Our Clock is so stable that you can play it for 3 million years and it will never be off by more than a fraction of a second".

Please notice the significance of this. Be aware of the logical trap that this "frequency stability" terminology is putting people into!

Liudas

Jitter occurs mostly at the DAC, whether with music server or CDP.