cheeseroo, you sound like my Ph.D. advisor but I agree ;-)
I don't have scientific papers on sound, I did that kind of stuff on audiovisual stuff in my old days and it's scientifically proven that e.g. we can see way, way, way less than 1% irregularities on a one-color plane as long it's a pattern (pattern is a very complex thing, you go into self-similarity and other hard math I don't feel like doing here). And yes, it does _not_ mean our audio complex is the same way (but I would very hard bet on that, especially in 1-4kHz at normal loudness, speech recognition perfected for million years is a complete marvel when you go a tad into how to do it with computers [used to listen to lots of lectures given by guys in Watson research on that topic, but it was a different angle than what we do of course, albeit very solid science, full of markov-chains ;-)]). Just think quickly what we're doing when in a noisy bar where a dozen people are talking, music is playing and a guy with an accent we never heard is explaining something to us. And he's drunk and blurs vocals.
The pico-seconds stuff we can hear is just something I picked of a web site so no clue whether it's true? no resaerch I can point to here. Any Ph.D. candidates out there listening ? ;-)
For psychological modification of what we hear, the patricia -woman (sorry forgetting the name) has been widely published and it's very solid research (but hey, read Kant, he knew it all the way along).
In your summary you're slightly off, I _don't believe_ jitter is an issue, I was asking for enlightement, I see it as the next possiblity of what to improve unless given better ideas here. Following Occam's razor here, unless given a simpler theory of what to tinker on next ;-)
And finally chesseroo, don't forget that science is nothing else than modern day religion and other approaches have been taken quite seriously much longer than the time passed since Bacon [whom I would loosely label as father of the repeatable experiment on nature as the standard we hold our believes to]. Read Thomas of Acquine (spelling, darnd ?) and Kant's 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' and talk to some of the bleeding edge sub-atomic particles physisicts of today, this is the god-damnd hardest darnd math beyond my brain and when you listen to them, they sound exactly like meta-physicists of the middle-age, 'parallel universes' anyone or 'our brain being an instrument that creates conciousness, physical laws and time'. Heidegger was mumbling about that 100 years ago and was laughed at ;-) ?
-- tony
