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In my personal experience, and I would dare say in common understanding, there is a huge difference between the sound of low and high jitter systems. When the jitter amount is very high, as in very low cost CD players (2ns), the result is somewhat similar to wow and flutter, the well known problem that affected typically compact cassettes (and in a far less evident way turntables) and was caused by the non perfectly constant speed of the tape: the effect is similar, but here the variations have a far higher frequency and for this reasons are less easy to perceive but equally annoying.

Wow and flutter on cassette tapes I will give him. He says turntables are far less susceptable to W&F than cassettes (and usually 0.15% is good for a turntable, belt or direct drive) meanwhile my CBC Radio Reference Disc suggests that a "pass" for a CD player is less than 0.002%... doing that math, a "passable" CD player exhibits 75 times less W&F than an excellent turntable. This is equally annoying? To listen to, or when you have to admit that your audio system isn't nanosecond perfect?!?

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Very often in these cases the rhythmic message, the pace of the most complicated musical plots is partially or completely lost, music is dull, scarcely involving and apparently meaningless, it does not make any sense. Apart for harshness, the typical "digital" sound, in a word.

Oh, god... melodramatic much? The music is dull and lifeless because of a 0.00000003 second "swing" in sample timing? Gracious, this guy must be a hit at the symphony... "that bassoon player ruined it for me, I could tell he drank mineral and not bottled water before the concert, his reed was vibrating 2 nanoseconds behind the alto sax!"

Bren R.