—William Shakespeare, King Richard II, V, v, 42
From Stereophile.com:
"Bits is bits!" goes the cry from skeptics when audiophiles criticize digital sound. In other words, the digital bits that constitute the music, as they make their way from disc to sound via the technological marvel of digital/analog conversion, are immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous analog fortune. What is often forgotten is the fact that not only must the amplitude—ie, what the bits describe—of the converted analog signal be correct, but the timing of the conversion of each digital word to analog must also be correct. The right bits at the wrong time are equivalent to the wrong bits at the right time. And if the bits are, as a result of the timing uncertainty in the conversion to analog, the wrong bits, then the recovered analog signal will be distorted, and will not sound as good as predicted.
The timing uncertainty in a digital audio system is called "jitter," and was described in full in a tutorial article by Barry Blesser in the October 1978 issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society."
Read more at:
http://www.stereophile.com/features/1208jitter/
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