Read the jitter comments by Alan. It's in his usual style [slight irony on] 'get a couple pieces of lamp cord, your mom's portable player and two empty cans and you built the equivalent of a 100k$ setup, oops, not cans, axioms' [/slight irony off]. That all maybe true scientifically, but why did I hear a discernible difference when running my gear of a 541i vs. a Audiotron over toslink. Both put out a digital stream. And why is the 541s analog oversampled output discernibly better than the digital (which surprised me a lot)? DAC, clock jitter? Shouldn't be either according to Alan. The best explanation I have is right now digital 'clock jitter' so maybe I'll try to follow it up. It can and has been measured that there is jitter on S/PDIF [clock is recovered from signal] influenced by material played. And of course, my digital preamp is having another unsynchronized digital clock taking that in. So the wave form, when restored at wrong time, may get warped significantly enough to matter? Why not clock sync the CD player and the preamp, can't be bad, except some money wasted ;-)
finally, I agree completely with Alan that room response and speakers response is _dimensions_ more important than the 'jitter' kind of stuff. I am still flabbergasted how people talk about 'more controlled bass' when changing amps in a room. Without room correction, bass is all over the place unless you have a room calculated and built just for listening and without room modes. Bass peaks of 5dB are already very good and on average setups I see +/-30dB!
But once you corrected for it, it may be that the smaller differences start to become more discernible. don't know, I'm searching here ...
BTW, I have a Ph.D. in software and my dad is a E.E. so I have a strong technical/scientific background and not musical. I always prefer science over rumors but I learned that most science is built on models or controlled experiments that only mirror reality to a certain degree and then either the model has to be improved or you get a guy with a lot experience and serious gut-feeling ;-)
