I was more interested in finding out what was supposed to be wrong with spdif. If we start with the assumption that a proper clock sync is needed and you don't get it all the time (supposedly it's data dependent, therefore sometimes it's correct and sometimes it's not), then there has to be jitter.
I didn't get the impression he was trying to sell me anything. The lessloss people were, but I'm not spending $2000 to reduce jitter, nor would I suggest anyone else do that.
What I understood the 2nd guy as saying, was that if you go out and buy a $20 CD player it will be using a cheap and unreliable crystal. Avoiding the bottom end players doesn't sound like bad advice to me. As far as DACs go, there are some relatively inexpensive ones (I don't have models or pricing) that do their own syncing.
In any case we went down this road because I contend that making random data changes to a wav file is not the same as jitter. I will agree that if you made changes to almost every sample (not just say 10 changes) and no one heard a difference, then they probably wouldn't notice jitter either. Still, these are 2 different things being tested.
I don't know if anyone can really notice or hear jitter. This can all be factual, yet at the same time it could also be meaningless if even with crappy crystals, it's undetectable by the human ear.
The proper way to test this would be to set up a DAC that allows you set parameters for it's timing. This way you could force it to deviate by some fixed amount from the clock. Once you have this, you would run ABX tests and see how much deviation from the clock is needed for differences to be heard. If it turns out to be a value that is much greater than even the cheapest equipment puts out, then we know this whole issue is BS.
