Jitter's audible effects
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- Опубліковано 25 січ 2014
- We all know jitter, in digital audio, isn't something we want. But why? How does it sound? How does it affect the way our systems perform and what does it do to the music? PS Audio consulting digital expert, Ted Smith, gives us a clear picture of what damage jitter does with the music.
- Наука та технологія
I like all the noise in this recording, true sign of audio enthusiast
Gets my toe tapping.
Why does that matter at all when making a UA-cam video with someone simply speaking? How it all does that correlate to the products they sell?
@@thegrimyeaper lmfaaoooo
hahaha the funny thing is black metal sounds way better on poo quality because noise and distortion is what they want. instead of hifi gear for better detail you get shit gear to add a lovely tinge to the music.
Jitter wont matter if the A/D converters are driven by the same local oscillator. Since you can easily purchase oscillator with inter period jitter
you're too educated to be in the audiophile community lol
Why don't you just play two sounds, one with high jitter and one with low jitter...? I have been thru 10 freakin videos and no one gives examples..!
If it is indeed as they describe, it would be kinda impossible to demonstrate low jitter over UA-cam.
Even if it is "kinda impossible to demonstrate low jitter over UA-cam", wouldn't it be very possible to demonstrate high jitter, or at least simulate it? If you exaggerate jitter, wouldn't it sound somewhat like wow & flutter? That can be easily demonstrated over YT ..
www.sereneaudio.com/blog/what-does-jitter-sound-like
It’s simply sounds like a high noise floor, if talking about the jitter in relation to DACs and whatnot (as opposed to any jitter caused by dirty electricity).
He mentioned before that the jitter that matters most is at the final D/A stage. Jitter in the signal before that point is mostly taken care of by buffers. So I don't know, maybe it would be impractical to try to give examples?
Ninja6485 If you cannot give evidence of a claim, then why should anyone believe it? There should at least be some kind of visual representation of what jitter does to the waveform. They could also provide some example files in uncompressed format on a server, then you download these fiiles and play them back on X or Y playback device to hear how much better Y is compared to X in the jitter department.
This gentleman offers excellent insight on the topic. For those of us who have recorded numerous songs on various digital formats over the years, we can relate to unexplained 'hazy', 'slightly distorted' audio appearing at the end of a lot of hard work. The decay of a cymbal could be affected by numerous conditions in the recording process, but I get what he is saying in relation to the jitter topic. This video is not for everybody, but insightful as part an often frustrating element in the digital puzzle. Thanks!
Great stuff!
When jitter gets high enough, you can hear a very quick 'click' when it happens at the edge of your perception. If you are paying attention when it happens, it is obvious. I guess it is the timing catching up or delaying chopping up the wave form which sounds like a click to the ear.
As far as toslink jitter goes... *cough* bullshit *cough* I have no idea where this comes from. Optical is great, it actually gets rid of an actual cause of problems, ground loops and EMI.
But you forgot show us jitters audible effects!
Hardly surprising given it is marketing BS.
Hi and thanks a lot for the very nice and valuable video. I wonder how much jitter can a dac bear still giving out a great sound. In my mind i think that some dacs are very good at correcting jitter present in the incoming signal. That would be fantastic because it would make the digital source selection process much less critical.
I grew up with vinyl and tape and accepted the quality for what it was, and then CD's came out, and the "true audiophiles" complained about that.
It will get to the point when these audiophiles try to reinvent the wheel and the community will spend the rest of the time arguing about what colour it should be.
when we don't want random noise in the high frequencies we call it jitter
when we do want it, we call it dithering
That's not exactly how it works.
With modern digital devices jitter is typically 110 to 120 dB below the music, even for inexpensive consumer-grade gear. In my experience that is far too soft to be audible. Indeed, this is 20 dB or more below the noise floor of a CD!
What kind of dB are we talking about here? dB is a logarithmical scale with a certain reference. I'm just wondering what we take as a reference here.
Also, source?
I spent time trying to EQ something that didn’t sound quite right. Got a clock n bye bye to anomaly EQ problems and the mixed opened up. Noticed it immediately. I couldn’t see spending money on a clock like everyone else until I finally did. Big difference
Jitter is a timing error. A timing error manifests as a frequency error. Pitch errors. The Stereophile test CD no. 2 demonstrates audible jitter. This should be something you can hear in even a cheap audio system.
Mistuned fm station. That is exactly what my audio sounded like from the dac directly to my gaming pc(beefy 3090 rtx) until I plugged in a ddc. Night and day difference.
La gente que niega los efectos audibles del jitter en SPDIF no han pensado que SPDIF es una transmisión síncrona y el reloj maestro depende del esclavo por lo que si el reloj esclavo tiene muchas fluctuaciones el dispositivo receptor no podrá hacer prácticamente nada por eliminarlas por lo que un dispositivo con una implementación muy mala de SPDIF puede degradar la señal con efectos audibles.
There's a God!
OK. Show me.
I can't.
So, it's not real.
Only certain people can see it.
So, it's like a religion?
While God _does_ speak to some people (believe me), He doesn't make many personal appearances and keeps a low profile, allowing His creation to speak for itself as the work of outstanding creative excellence, ingenuity and beauty.
But because He is a gracious God, He hasn't left mankind without answers. He has provided a great deal of communication for us all recorded in the Bible. The Bible _really is_ the true word of God. It contains hundreds of amazing predictions about the future which so far have always come true. There are many other ways that the Bible can be verified as having been written by God, including its astounding mathematical properties, which would be impossible for humans to have orchestrated, even with computers.
Now most people aren't interested in God. They just want to live their lives, have a bit of fun for a while, then eventually die. And that's their choice. They don't care about God, and God doesn't particularly care about them.
But for anyone who is interested in higher things - the information is all there about God: What is His name? What sort of personality does He have? What does He think and feel? Why did He make the universe? What are the origins of all the humans? And why is there such a great division between Him and mankind?
The Bible also answers the questions of what is going to happen in the future: What is the fate of mankind? What will happen to the earth? As well as the biggest questions of all: How can a bad person be forgiven? How can a flawed person be fixed? And is it actually possible to live forever?
The answer to that last question is: Yes! Through faith in God's Son Jesus!
@@Scripture-Man LOL
Jitter is real. Its proven.
God is not real. No proof of any gods
Yep. Placebophilia=religion
Bertrand russels flying teapot. If you saw a teapot flying through space, how would you prove to someone that you did?
I have an RME ADI 2 fs DAC so maybe I am lucky, but I do wander for how small a percentage of systems actually suffer from Jitter.
Your example "...reading off disks.." is like comparing an arrow to a guided missile every component, clocks etc has improved.
I am on full fibre ,then galvanically insulated ethernet cable does that mean I don't have signal fase issues to start with?
Will the slightest tweak of the positioning of your speakers not offset femtosecond differences in timing at the "Sweet spot"
I am not in any anti jitter camp I just am interested in aspects beyond if it exists or not.
I think that there should be more options in dealing with it ,even if that is just switch the fase button in many systems ,before considering more money on a solution to what may not be the problem . Especially if the sceptics are right then any audible imperfections in your sound are caused by something unrelated.
👍it's nice to have an expert to question. I will not be offended if many of the assumptions in my points you can explain why I am wrong? I am not technical, but I am a Torus. first convince me then I am happy to change my tune (Pun intended) entirely.
If there's audible noise disturbances on old computer systems it might as well be electrical HF noise by induction or capacitance. Not necessarily jitter per se. It could be both before and after conversion to analogue.
2:50 our ears don't just locate sounds based on volume differences! Our part of the brain that receives the signals from the ears is more like a holographic processor. Tiny phase differences in the timing in difference in reaching our ears allows us to determine where the sound comes from, besides this the sound bending round our heads changes and those minute colorations also give us directional clues. Imagine just how good our brain is, that you can locate sounds from above, behind, side, front. If it would be just volume then we wouldn't have all these problems with audio, and we would all have 36.4 audio in our homes. 2.0 or 2.1 is the only format that is acceptable to our ears, but sadly doesn't make full use of our ears abbilities. Surround sound is never truely surround sound, it is nice effects coming from the side or the rear, with no coherence with the front speakers, just an added source. The only way for us to have perfect sound is a perfect binaural headphone (discussed @ PS Audio) but the problem with that is that each of our heads and brain is different and perfect binaural audio would be a whole shelf of acedemic works and massive personalized dsp. But if you want the best stereo effect it is best to use a single source full range driver in a matched pair.
Jitter, in my understanding, is a problem of timing in the digital domain. In my experience, jitter only becomes audible in a very nasty way (e.g. harshness, details getting lost, uninvolving sound, lose mid bass and bass performance) when using a rotating digital disc (one's own cds or sacds). It seems nearly impossible to get a jitter free digital stream out of these discs when playing them as intended. Just my 2c.
Great video, I completely agree. I had a cheap plastic TOSLINK ebay cable from TV to DAC which got chewed by a gerbil and I sellotaped it back together after cutting the ends flat. It worked however I replaced it with a 'decent' glass 60 buck TOSLINK which is advertised as low jitter, good reviews, etc. Even the wife noticed how the soundstage was clearer and more solid and I hadn't told her about the cable upgrade.
I hope she was in the kitchen and doesn't care about audio. It's always important to add those two bits.
Delightful!
packet delivery mismatch can be a bitch as latency and packet corruption cause the dreaded jitters too! windows used to way overuse something called qos(great in theory but a bit questionable in use).
streaming could/can be acceptable or awful depending on the buffer size on packet transfers and hardware decoding capabilities.
i try whenever possible to run as much content to ram as possible from the chosen source. keeps the latency down as much as the hardware will allow(hint:port baud rate increase for one...).
just one of many aspects of software vs hardware implementation in digital sound reproduction that we,the end users,can do something about with a bit of patience and research.
Tengo un decodificador de TV barato que tiene salida SPDIF Toslink y cuando lo conecto a un DAC por Toslink el sonido se oye muy distorsionado y sin claridad, un día coloque un conmutador Toslink de 4 entradas en mi DAC y cuando probé el decodificador a través del conmutador la claridad del sonido mejoró enormemente, he desarmado el conmutador por curiosidad y lleva un chip VHC153, un STC11 y un modulador de cristal de cuarzo de 16Mhz, no se nada de electrónica pero si no me equivoco son un microcontrolador y un multiplexor.
¿Es posible que mi decodificador genere grandes cantidades de jitter y el conmutador lo ha aliviado al resincronizar la señal con su propio reloj? ¿Es posible que mi conmutador pueda hacer esto?
Does jitter have anything to do with that terrible high-end warbled, garbled, whooshing sound that comes in around 10kHz and above when you upload audio to Facebook or sometimes Soundcloud? Does anybody know the sound that I'm talking about? A mix can sound fine in your DAW but when you upload it to Facebook or sometimes to SoundCloud the high highs get all warped and tinny sounding.
If you want to hear what (exaggerated) jitter actually sounds like search for "serene audio what does jitter sound like".
So many videos on this subject and none of them has an actual example of jitter that you can hear.
On my audio system I can hear more jitter on the Toslink between the CD and DAC than on the digital coax cable. I experience jitter two ways. 1) Jitter sounds more harsh to me. It is like running a finger over a smooth surface and running a finger over very fine grit sandpaper. 2) When there is more jitter (more harshness) I also notice my nerves are slightly more on edge. Less jitter (or even less harshness in a system) and my nerves relax. The effects are subtle but for me noticeable. This connection between my hearing and my nerves is much more sensitive in me than other people I know.
This video is disappointing. I thought I would learn what jitter sounds like, but all that Ted talks about - front to back depth, clarity of a decaying cymbal - can be easily explained by poor room acoustics. It amazes me that people obsess over jitter artifacts that are 20-30 dB below the noise floor of a CD (think about that!), but ignore the distortion of their loudspeakers and the 30+ dB peak and null spans in their listening room.
+Paul McGowan Thanks Paul, I didn't actually expect an answer! But it will take a lot of evidence to convince me that jitter is ever a problem, even a tiny problem, with modern digital gear. All of the graphs I've seen show jitter noise (typical amounts) at > 100 dB below the signal.
+Ethan Winer I completely agree. I was disappointed with the claim at the beginning of the video that somehow "People's toes tapping to the music" has any relationship with audio artifacts caused by jitter.
Hell, I've seen people "tapping their toes" listening to terrible laptop speakers which obviously have drastically poorer audio quality than even the worst sound card going through decent speakers.
What bold misinformation.
It's so hard to concentrate while thinking about how this man eats a pizza.
I'm having a problem with the sound on SACD's. I have a year old Yamaha RX-A2030 and a brand new Oppo BDP-103, connected with the HDMI cable which was supplied by Oppo. Sometimes it sounds great, and at other times, there is a noticeable harshness, sometimes to the point of distortion. This is most easily heard in the violins. Is this jitter? If so, what can I do about it?
podiumman2 This is VERY common, A lot of things can effect the sound during different listening times, quality of the supply power, temperature of the equipment or ambient air, even your mood. I doubt it's the Oppo or the HDMI but you could try a good quality optical lead directly into the Yammy and see it it changes the problem. My music always sounds better in the early hours of the morning when the power is cleaner. Consider a mains conditioner or regenerator if you think this is the case, they definitely help matters. When you have bad jitter the sound (to my ears) seems just wrong, it doesn't have good timing to it or the air and space and naturalness of the sound seems blurred. It can be as bad as listening to a low bit mp3 against an uncompressed high quality lossless music file.
MG Samps Thanks for the reply. I doubt it's the AC, because there are other sound sources which sound very clear with no harshness. As for using the optical out, DSD won't go over that, unless I reduce it down to 44.1 khz sampling/16 bit, then owning SACD's and the Oppo SACD player would be pointless.
I would be surprised if high Jitter caused distortion but a little harshness would be possible I suppose. I have found some recordings to also be at fault, a classic example being Ludovico Einaudi piano recordings, superb music ruined by overloaded on recording. I actually thought my tweeters were faulty.
@Lloyd Stout Thanks, I should have remembered that, I'm used to using my Cambridge CXU outputting from the RCA into my amp.
Okay, my youtube sometimes sounds like Max Headroom... is that jitter? I'm just trying to find out what the problem is called so I can figure out how to fix it. Usually if I create a new tab or do something in another tab while playing youtube in the first tab I will get like a 1 second jitter/glitch/whatever it is called. Not joking about Max Headroom... sounds just like that.
TO me personaly jitter feels like the audio is gasping and catching up, it makes the music loose solid singular tone & texture. But in some electronica music that is part of the desired effect. Lower bit rate AAC annoys me the most with jitter, I can always here is blind because my stupid MP4 player sync creates AAC copies by acident with out me knowing.
If jitter can be heard, it's a simple matter to mess up an equipment to produce it. Why isn't it done?
Hell, after watching this video, I still have no idea what the word jitter actually means... other than some bad voodoo magic.
This presenter is on to something I hear when I stream my radio show to an FM radio station. The audio out of the transmitter has this effect in the audio. Certain songs have cymbals and they are not crystal clear..............so fast tracking this blog......what can be done to stop the jitter???? Reproducing this jitter sound CAN be reproduced on UA-cam
This video is very old, mordern DACs and USB drivers dont have this issue anymore. Been tested many times its not a thing anyone needs to worry about.
I gotta stop using my pocket watch as a word clock.
That, with the coffee habit, and it’s just jitter city round hyar
My toes stopped tapping. Must be lots of jitter in this video. :/
can anyone actually tell me what jitter sounds like? is it that sort of farting sound caused by what i assume is "jitter"
6 years later, I'm sure a lot of these commenters below will be eating their words lol.
How about from a SSD?
Elwin Franken Did you mean DSD?
From a SSD would be irrelevant as it is the jitter caused by the clock that sets the data on the DAC.
As for DSD it'd give the same result as PCM.
Err hang on. Jitter is a real and measurable phenomenon. It afflicts highly stressed high speed data networks. But the hardware and firmware is designed to accommodate this. Jitter is measurable and for a typical consumer grade CD player it's of the order of a couple of dozen picoseconds. This is tiny and definitely not audible.
For reference, 1 pico-second is to 1 second what 1 second is to 32,000 years!!
The clock is derived by a frequency divider from one running 1000s of times faster than the sampling rate anyway.
how do you measure it in the brain?
Hmm, its unlikely a human being can perceive a 0.1 pico second clock error.
The question is what can we actually hear? We can talk about distortion or any number of things but how accurate does that xtal really have to be and what can we actually discern? When we get older our hearing falls off quite a bit. Can you, Paul, actually hear 14kHz, have you measured your hearing spectrum and what is it? Can you hear minute differences in jitter in a blind 'A' / 'B' test? At what point is the cost of reducing jitter further a waste of money? Because I think we can get close enough today that, for a relatively low cost we can beat human hearing especially once we get older. Audiophiles crack me up, if they really hear all they say they do they should be auditioning for the Berlin Philharmonic conductor. I think we spend ridiculous amounts of money patronizing our egos. As for distortion, we worry about minute distortion but the truth is, not only can't we hear the difference between .01 and .001 percent, it has very little if anything to do with musicality , what we actually like to listen to. Someone could easily tap his feet to a raspy distorted guitar because that's what he or she likes.
The quality and magnitude of basic audio chips is so good today that we can buy an off the shelf $5.00 chip that beats the pants off a complex design made up of hand assembled components. What we can do is use components, tubes or chips to create a specific sound we like but jitter? OK it's not nothing but let's not make it the Holy Grail, it's not but people selling audio equipment have to find a way to justify the high cost of components so now we have jitter and notch or whatever.
Sorry mosfet500,
Think you make an awful lot of statements without having a clue. Most important you underestimate the abilities of our brain. You seem convinced that measuring equipment will outperform our senses, that we f.e. can determine the taste of wine by means of chemical analysis, that we can determine the sound quality of equipment by measurements.............. Forget it!
Please start using your senses and enjoy them, life's too short to drink cheap wine.
Your question remains: What can we actually hear ? Science would like to know what and how.
Where is the sample? Too much talking
He has jitter all over his face.
Jitter is inaudible, even on cheap gear. Double blind tests have pretty much invalidated this audiophool nonsense.
Hi, Paul. I respect your viewpoint, but In would point you to one of the many threads at AVS forum on jitter. The consensus seems to be that it is measurable with test equipment but is far below the threshold of audibility. I've always regarded the audibility of jitter as being in the same "snake oil" area as $10,000 speaker cables, burn in, and cable conditioners. However, I try to keep an open mind. Are there double-blind studies you can point me to that would support its audibility? Thanks for the response and all the best!
Excellent points! Thank you for the detailed reply. I may be a skeptic, but I am always ready to change my view when presented with evidence. For example, I have seen many studies that support that a high definition audio stream is indistinguishable from a well-prepared Redbook down-res of the same stream. There are a number of DB studies that support this conclusion. However, I do know of one person who can reliably distinguish HD from Redbook -- he has an almost perfect record. So now I have to admit that there are indeed some people capable of making this distinction (though I am not one of them).; Thanks again for the excellent info!
Brian Straight I thought jitter is a mental thing like a syndrome , am I wrong ?
BigBallsTv please tell me what jittering means in music ?!! I'm soo frustrated!
so you mean the music isn't synchronized ?!!
Good sir, you're wrong. In order of the chain, this is how your sound will be limited. 1. Speakers fidelity - i.e. decay, resonance, distortion, phase issues 2. Room acoustics, reflections and dead zones for bass 3. source, i.e. amplifier and DAC, or analog. But guess what, my Philips X3 headphones still sound much better than my speakers running through a Schiit DAC and quality speaker amp despite being run through my cheap onboard sound and monitor audio out. You're vastly overemphasizing jitter's audibility, I'd look to your tweeters if cymbals sound weird, try some Dayton AMT sweetness.
All I know is that I don't care how good the analog recording is, whether they recorded it on tape going 900 inches per second, pressed into 9 lb. vinyl, played using the best cartridge known to man, I have never but never not heard some amount of tape hiss or surface noise. I can hear studio noise in digital as well as analog recordings. I went out and tried to hear jitter and the only difference I hear is when it's extreme. So someone is trying to tell me they'll put up with surface or tape or equipment noise through a $million system, but not jitter? I think there are bigger fish to fry.... like fish at all.
Yes, I have the same feeling. I grew up with vinyl and tape and accepted the quality for what it was, and then CD's came out, and the "true audiophiles" complained about that.
It will get to the point when these audiophiles try to reinvent the wheel and the community will spend the rest of the time arguing about what colour it should be.
You lost me at Vinyl sounds better than cd!
Tyrone Bunne cd does not work that way, nothing is sliced, as there are phisical limitations to your ear, to the recording head of a vinyl recorder, to the playback needle of a pickup, CD takes that into account and only retains the useful part of data that you need. CD and in general digital to audio uses algorithms to very closely match the waveform it is copying.
In the same way cd is flawed vinyl is also flawed, and it depends on a lot of things working perfectly with no self correcting mechanisms. in vinyl you assume that the motor is rotating at the right speed, the pressure is optimal on the disk, the grooves are not dirty, the vibrations in the room and from the speakers playing the music do not interfere with the needle scratching the surface of the disc etc.
Vinyl has a much lower dynamic range, it has limitations. Don't be dumb. Vinyl ripped to lossless audio will sound identical through both mediums, identical. The difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps is hardly audible. Vinyl suffers mechanical wear and requires a bulky, expensive device to play and is a one-time copy. Digital music can be stored with extras and on devices small as a box of tic tacs, and listened to portably via modern speakers and headphones.
@@tyronebunne2220 "Noiseless vinyl"? Hmm. Would you like to buy shares in my unobtainium mine?
Yes, I have the same feeling. I grew up with vinyl and tape and accepted the quality for what it was, and then CD's came out, and the "true audiophiles" complained about that.
It will get to the point when these audiophiles try to reinvent the wheel and the community will spend the rest of the time arguing about what colour it should be.
I tuned into this video to learn something about jitter. I was very disappointed to hear this guy talk about toe-tapping???? Nothing of any use in this video.
What a load of horseshit with all the fake unconnected equipment and the Ebay from Asia quality air tool. Maybe that is why PS Audio Dacs are loaded with distortion, jitter and other issues.
@@magog6852 Real a-hole identified and science denier. What is your education in at college/university. What was your GPA. How many patents do you have of a technical nature? How many technical papers have you authored.
Who actually "toe taps", you people are weird.
If you ask me, it doesn't get much "weirder" than spending your time having a go at people for moving with the music.
BS like this guarantees that I will never buy a PS Audio product. Large amounts of timing jitter can cause bit errors and a complete loss of signal. Small amounts of jitter can be measured by a simple spectral and THD analysis. Most jitter-related analog artifacts are >100 dB down from the fundamental. Despite this, jitter has become the new negative-feedback-is-bad, high-end-cables-are- the-source-of-salvation, turntables-rule, tweako garbage enabled by vendors that probably know (or should know) better.