Between you, Jim Lill and a few others you have pretty much destroyed any notion that recording music has to be expensive. And this is a good thing. It forces creators to focus on the art, not the tools. Thank you.
I built my first DAW in 1999/2000. You had to pay quite a bit to get good convertors, and you had to pay more to get converters that were located in the breakout box (I drooled over the MOTU 1824 iirc), because converters close to the PCI bridge would pick up noise. And the budget converters weren’t guaranteed to be shielded. Anything available today in the recording space is orders of magnitude better than hardware 25 years ago. The playing field is more level than it has ever been, and it’s just going to get better.
Yeah, everything is so good nowadays. But... some are chasing some past times characters. And putting multiple so-so devices in chain might lead to audible problems sooner.
I've always wondered what "Jitter" is. Julian should run a series called "Everything you wanted to know about digital audio, but were afraid to ask". 👍
I wouldn't worry about "The Jitter Bug" folks. The primary thing that is ruining "your audio" is a lack of creativity. WE are focusing on the wrong "things". Focus-right
@@vadimmartynyuk Maybe more than some other interfaces, but not enough to actually cause a problem for literally anyone making music. If you are deciding between interfaces based on amount of jitter, you're *looking* for a problem and picking based on random numbers on a random graph rather than using your ears.
I am not an audiophile. I am a vo artist , and Ihad to teach myself audio editing for my home studio. Many of your videos have helped my journey along the way. You have a way of explaining your process without being condescending or all knowing. you display facts and graphs an interesting narrative that allow even technoobies like myself understand what the topic is and what the issues are. thank you for taking the time and sharing your passion and knowledge
Hey mister Julian Krause! Do you have your "audio interface tier list" -stream or the final chart somewhere? I would really appreciate it. Sorry for comment that is unrelated to the video.
Some years ago I purchased a "JitterBug" from AudioQuest specifically BECAUSE I believed it was pure snake oil, and I felt my first deliberate "audiophile head-fi" setup would be incomplete without a dash of such. As far as audiophile snake oil goes, it seemed like a pretty cheap option for such pure stuff lol. Love this channel. Love Krausian humor. Better therapy than "Therapy", and less risk of snake oil than that realm too.
@@scorpioassmodeusgtx1811 *shrug* I'm relieved to hear that I didn't get a watered down dash of snake oil. Also, don't really care, per this video. EDIT: Skimmed the ASR review. The conclusion appears to be that it does nothing audible, and barely anything even confidently measurable, as is the conclusion of several other reviews linked around the ASR forums. I didn't see any mention of increasing jitter in the conclusions. Leaving my prized snake oil in the signal chain.
@@attaboyBrad I believe the increase in jitter was only observed when combined with one DAC, namely the the Schiit Modi 2. But even then the differences were well below what could be considered audible. It's safe to say it has no practical positive or negative effect.
I always thought of jitter as just another effect to be added when using effects that intentionally reduce samplerate and bitrate over a channel. I found a little added jitter to be pleasing in the cases were I use it. A little jitter makes bitcrunching sound more organic, and less like static
@@miquelmarti6537 this is just in context of using an Ableton Live effect over a single channel to add some grit, say for a bass track. Sorry I wasn't being clear. Oversampling wouldn't really add much in this case. I mean, the idea is intentionally to reduce samplerate.
Thanks for sharing science-backed facts :) ! I can only agree with the content of this video, and I'm happy to see content like that that participates to sharing the truth. A fellow home studio youtuber from France
Thank you so much for making this video! I have been arguing with people about this here on youtube, who spend lots of money in fear of the mighty jitter. Looking at your jitter results, I would say those noise in the graphs most probably are a result of other problems than jitter. Jitter was a problem 30 years ago, when they just started to make digital audio devices. I do not think anyone still have any devices which have any jitter problem anymore, as it is not a difficult problem to solve. The only time you can have jitter problems, if your device is just faulty.
I dont know how you made this video without the words ' *clock recovery* ' but i'm quite grateful that you demonstrated just how astonishingly good the clock recovery on my Audient Evo16 is even on SPDIF in a worst case scenario, makes me worry a lot less about how the optical jitter is these days (i didnt think it was an issue, but i feel lazy not using the word clock lol)
I'm worried I might become and audiophile but.. isn't just knowing the small degrees to which you can go make you an audiophile as well? The depth of knowledge. I don't know man, its a very fun rabbit hole. as my quest continues I have one more question.. is there a positive term for audiophile or is it simply .."audio engineer" LOL or "audio explorer" I used the term "audio surfing" to describe getting my first truly mixed track. so smooth... it was like I was riding the audio waves. thanks for the info sir. V/R ~Bobby
@@bobbybird3677 Thanks so much for the tip! I think it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Audiophile is a positive term for me. The most important thing is after going down a rabbit hole to pull one self out again and enjoy the music. Knowing technical stuff to not get lured into snake-oil products is important but so is taking the time to sit down and enjoying your system. That’s what being an Audiophile about. Enjoy the music!! 😀
Thank you for making this great video! Years ago, my mastering engineer made jitter out to be this really terrible thing. But that was years ago. And I've always wondered about it since. But because of your great video... no more worries! Keep up the great work!
Great video! Perhaps a future topic of clocking between multiple digital interfaces is in order? Many people get jitter/clocking issues confused and it's probably because the understanding of what jitter actually is isn't widely known (hopefully this video puts that to bed).
Lowest I can go for my 48 year old ears is -72dB. So I think I'm in the clear, lol. Another reason why I also don't worry about whether my music is 16bit or 24bit.
Thank you so much for dispelling so many lies and unfounded "fears" about the jitter issue, especially those related to high-end DACs. I was seriously considering shelling out more bucks for the Eversolo Master Edition steamer DAC due to its more accurate femto clock than the standard edition, but after watching your video I'm more convinced that the standard Eversolo edition is the way to go--especially since I'm not an audiophile nor do I possess a super, high-end sound equipment at home. Thanks again for posting! It was a very enlightening video.
Your reviews are fantastic. An unrelated subject suggestion: after watching many reviews for budget interfaces, it would be nice to give example scenarios of what type of user would take the most advantage of their particular features. That would make your revires from a 9.9 output to an 11 score output in the consumer scale. Thank you for your excellent work
My PC was next to the microphone arm and when I folded it it stayed close. Now I have moved the PC and I no longer have any problems. Thanks to your reviews I bought a Focusrite Clarett 2pre and I'm pleased with it. Nowadays there are a lot of people doing podcasts, It would be a great idea to review audio production solutions for podcasters like the Mackie DLZ Creator or RØDECaster Pro II. That would also be a fascinating video. Love your channel. 👍
We, the committee of Guinness World Records hereby announce: Julian Krause officially is the person, who said the word "jitter" more often than anybody else - ever! 🏆Congrats, Julian! 🤭 Thx for your excellent vids & cheers from Hamburg! LG cosmic
A lot of information yes, but wrong conclusions. Reclocking brings very obvious audible improvements, even in modern DACs, but according to your video it is negligible. In other words, DCS, Esoteric, Antipodes, to mention a few, are all wrong, but you are right. Yeah right. I believe my ears above and beyond any measurement.
@@StephanBuchin I studied and work in digital A/V and telecom electronics and thought just like you. It justified my inability to acquire high-end equipment, let alone test and compare it (not implying this is your situation). After decades, I finally had the chance to A/B systems on my own house (used gear from a friend's trade-in hi-fi store). Differences can be huge and obvious. Sometimes they are not. I appreciate your honesty, however you may want to personally test several high-end devices. My personal experience changed my mind significantly. Snake oil and overpriced gear exist, but not everything expensive is snake oil.
@@vmptyIf one can measure something, one may (!) also be able to hear it, often enough not even that. If however one cannot even measure something, no way there will be anything audible to detect as measurement systems simply way exceed humans' hearing abilities.
If your listening tests are not blind they don't worth anything, and if you think they do, you need to learn about biases and critical thinking. The brand you mentioned uses tools to design their products. Human ears are a poor way to judge audio fidelity. They are not "wrong", they say you will get better numbers and that it sounds great, this is all true, but they usually don't say the better numbers make it sound better. They usually avoid these kinds of statements or they simply lie. Jitter is measurable easily as noise, This is its only side effect. It's not possible to hear jitter with any modern audio converter. Wordclocking is only good for clocking multiple units, this is why they exist. If anything they can only degrade the "numbers" but it will not be audible.
@xfghffhfg I respect your science first approach, but you need also to respect the emotional approach. The sound that touches my emotions is what counts for me. In that scenario, I could not care less for biases and measurements.
@@CharlesBurnsPrime he over simplified it. It's much more complex than he made it out to be. That - 120db gets amplified. If you do actual a/b listening test you can tell the differences. Not so much that b you hear the jitter, but you can tell when there's a lack of jitter.
@@Pete.across.the.street Interesting. I would ask that you suggest a test for Julian to consider. He seems to be the kind of person that can share corrections or exceptions to claims without ego problems. I would love to understand this topic better as it is often discussed with regards to digital audio.
Good explanation JK! I do believe these statements are true for probably 99% of user listening scenarios, but strongly disagree about it being inaudible. I have experienced it myself on high end systems. DDC especially, if you can't hear the difference you don't have system that is revealing enough.
... that system including the human hearing capabilities which is exactly the reason why most of that audiophile voodoo is absolute nonsense. The ears are simply not good enough which for not too few people seems to be a fact very hard to accept. Those DDCs are real-life satire. Even IF they would have any effective audible impact, it wouldn't exactly speak for the DAC apparently then being in need to get a signal handed on a silver platter by them. Any decent DAC worth its salt has jitter rejection and whatnot already integrated so I would rather spend money on that part and certainly not any half-voodoo device in between if it has to be that way (RME ADI-2 with its FS-reclocking, Benchmark DACs, etc. and already that is most probably halfway voodoo as inaudible anyway)
Scientifically it's not possible to hear jitter. The only side effect of jitter is noise, measurable noise. If the test was not a blind A/B/C test multiple times with a measurement to exclude issues it's not a scientific statement. It's more probable that some bias was involved. Probably consumer bias and/or confirmation bias
@@xfghffhfg I agree, since it's only a derivation from the ideal clock rate. However, can't the side effect also manifest itself as distortion and not noise only if it is correlated with the input signal? One could argue that distortion is also a form of noise, but usually it is thought of being uncorrected and random. I guess we both share the opinion that this topic is blown entirely out of proportion and usual certainly not a major issue, be it noise or distortion.
@@little-endian5957 Anything that adds or subtracts to the signal can be considered distortion. Jitter only adds noise, this has been proven by nul testing.
Very interesting. What about jitter introduced by streaming services, ei: less than ideal Internet speeds, caché and buffering. I suspect that's Why physical media or local files seem to sound better than streaming, IMO. Thanks for the great video!
Streaming services uses packets of data. As demonstrated in the video, packetized data is totally impervious to jitter. The difference in quality is compression.
Streaming audio is put into a local buffer. The audio is played directly from the audio buffer which is local memory and, therefore, no more susceptible to jitter than a local file (which, incidentally, is also streamed, just from a local media rather than a remote one). "Buffering" occurs when the data stream isn't fast enough to keep the local buffers full. In that case you will get obvious dropouts or pauses in the stream. If the stream is fast enough (which, for streaming audio, that's normally the case) then you won't get buffering. Either way, you won't get jitter.
@@KeithMilner correct i was responding to the top comment which said that network jitter could cause quality issues with streaming services which is not the case
Bloody amazing content, mate. Keep on the great work! In a tech language way, you are the Glenn Fricker of audio interfaces, mythbusting sort of. For example, when it comes to SM7B -> SM57 discussion, instead of telling the same thing again and again as I did during the last 20 years, I just send a link of your video about the matter. It perfectly aligns to my experience. Ages ago when I worked for a broadcast company we tested AD/DA chips and used the same measures so although I'm not an engineer, your interface tests tell me everything about these new audio devices. Clear tech data and language, I really like that. When it comes to clocking / sync, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts about how differences between un-synced devices occur and how to solve timing issues between, for example, an audio interface and different cameras.
I am sort of reminded of the old analog days. I used a high-end open reel unit running 15 IPS; I used dbx noise reduction in many of those recordings. That meant, adding the 30 or so dB noise reduction to the already high signal to noise of my recorder (75dB or so at 15 IPS), I was running about 100 DB or a little more signal to noise ratio. Great specs; but if you listened carefully, you could hear the noise in between the notes on quiet passages. Thing is, if you’re just listening to the music, you never hear it. Your video makes me feel that way about jitter. Thanks!
@@StephanBuchin It can be. When dbx first came out, people were being told to way under-record, so that there would be less distortion. The dbx would take care of the hiss that way. dbx put in their instructions that you should record with peaks at or near 0 dB; that way, the noise control would be the best. Recording that way, you could still hear a little noise, especially on classical music. But things like jazz groups, rock, electronic Pop, the music covered the hiss pretty well.
As extremely correct as you are about jitter, using a highly distorted guitar as an example just doesn't make sense. Ages ago, when testing audio systems, Smokin' by Boston was one of my favorite sound check songs. Then I got to thinking, is my audio system accurately reproducing all the distortion?
Hey Julian, I’ve seen your Video about the Elgato Wave XLR interface. Now that Elgato have added the function to add vst plugins I wondered what you think of it now. If you could respond to this comment or do a video about it I would be very happy thank you.
Just goes to show that sometimes we focus too much on the phantom details, stuff that really doesn't matter. Let's all be more creative and focus on the art instead. Awesome and informative :)
This wrong idea of worrying about jitter these days comes from the peddlers who want to sell you their products... There is so much wasted money by poor audiophiles that believe those unscrupulous snake oil sellers...
There are 4 types of USB data transfer. Audio data transfer is done using Isochronous mode. This is a one way data transfer from source to destination like streams of data. There no way to detect error at the transmission level if the there is a timing variation while sampling by the receiver. The only way the receiver can detect error is by detecting PCM data encoding format by detecting the changes in voltage. It will reclock in needed. However there is no way to send request to sender to resent the correct data. Hence the receiver uses interpolation to set the data. This interpolation will depend of the DAC designer. This is one of the reason different DAC sounds different even when all other parameters remain same.
Clock disparity between USB host and device does not result in erroneous (misclocked) data transmission because USB uses NRZI encoding to interleave clock and data. Bit errors do occur, isochronous transfer just like any includes a CRC checksum, which allows one bit error correction per 1ms window. Sometimes, devices do not implement CRC checking for incoming data, but with modern USB processors, you expect that all of these current devices do. At higher error rates, the error leaks into the output. There is indeed no retransmission possibility with iso, because the transmission and processing time window is already spent, but if you had errors at mere fullspeed (12Mbaud) that were uncorrectible more frequent than once every few days, you'd be THIS close to the device regularly falling off the bus, so you don't have to worry about it. And interpolation... you're just throwing words around at this point.
@@SianaGearzThe lovely "Interpolation" had already been roped into the voodoo nonsense sphere since the good old audio CD era. Whenever the jitter voodoo wasn't enough for a pseudo-explanation, the next claim was that due to the oh so imperfect and overwhelmed error-correction so the player had to perform interpolation all the time - which simply isn't true. In most cases, it never occurs on the C2 stage resulting in uncorrectable errors for proper media and even if, it is hardly all the time but for a brief moment.
I have a DAC very similar to the $8 one shown on this video. I bought to convert digital coaxial into analog RCA and I haven't noticed any jitter or other kind of noise or artifact. Before this video, jitter was only mentioned and sometimes describe in ways I only had an idea about. Thank you!
I think it was you (can't remember which video and I may be wrong entirely) who said once that digitally-controlled preamps tend to have higher noise floors and that does seem to be born out in your measurements (with the Ultralite being an outlier), but I'd love a video exploring the topic. Is it a limitation of the control method or is it more of an issue of circuit design? Is there something that makes it so that a theoretically perfect fully analog preamp will always have lower noise vs a theoretically perfect digitally-controlled preamp?
Thank you Julian for the great explanation on this topic! In a forum on Gearspace I saw a discussion about operating systems on computers re-sampling audio and therefore leading to audible quality differences during playback. Does it have to do with Jitter as well or is there another reason for the audible loss in quality? Do you have a video on this topic or would that be something you'd do a video about? There are apps like Audirvana that promise to get around the re-sampling issue and to increase the playback quality.
The behringer UM2 is their cheapest (very cheap) and only does 16 bits even so its understandable that it doesnt perform as good as many others while still acceptable in this test. I would never recommend a 16 bit interface to anyone either, 24 bits is the go to if you want to make any kind of serious recording really.
6:20 how do you introduce jitter to these signals? How are these measured? Can you generate a tone in software to audio interface, and then record it also with the same interface to make this measurement?
Very well put argument and demonstrated evidence to debunk the snake oil sellers. Congratulations and thanks for all the clarity you bring to us on audio devices.
I did not think my system suffered from jitter but others make it sound so inevitable that you think 'maybe I have never heard what streaming sounds like with no jitter' I have just discovered your channel (subscribed) .I had a look at your channel hoping to see a video about hifi network switches. As they are another product I do not understand, they have to plug into a Reuter so haw can they improve on one? Have you done one if not could you? thanks. PS my next upgrade will be to replace my wiim pro, do you have any advice on quality streamers to consider?
I am using , from Mac Mini through USB, a Matrix SPDIF2 (reclocker) connected through IIS to Matrix Element X2 (dac/amp), with settings on synchronous mode. For me, it is an improvement of the sound . I don’t know if it is because jitter or ground , but it is doing a nice job . In this way, the sound is clearer , any sibilance is gone and bass is stronger and more defined in synchronous mode , than in asynchronous mode directly from usb. I really don’t think is a placebo, but who knows ?😊 I am using headphones.
You should purchase a good ddc or have someone lend you one to see if you hear a difference, and if you do hear a difference you could try to explain what it's doing to the audio signal.
Great video! I'm interested in using multichannel DACs for active loudspeaker use as a hobby. Fear of jitter drives me towards a USB DAC but it would be more convenient for many, I think, if one could just use an HDMI input to a receiver - DAC, volume control, and amps (OK weedy ones) all in one box. Could you comment on HDMI jitter with 4. 6 or 8 channels of PCM at various sample rates?
Awesome video. Anyway, I was wondering if you'll be taking a look at the new MOTU 828? It seems like an expanded version of the UltraLite mk5, and I hope it lives up to its quality!
I would love if you could make those audio samples downloadable to get around youtube compression and duplexing. They would be great to test out and demonstrate on our gear as a normal/high res file or even burn to cd. Does jitter have any impact on other components at all-since it's an artifact of conversion or transmission (SPDIF), does it compromise or degrade/affect the performance of other components at all downstream in any way like transistors or other amplification components, feed back circuits, tubes, (even theoretically) etc?
The side effects of jitter - even if allowed to persist until the DAC and not cancelled - end at the DAC reconstruction filter and at that point it's just sound, distorted sound but without any suspiciously bad characteristics, unlike say clipping.
@@SianaGearz thanks for the intel. I assumed there would be some effective filtering at some point, but wondered if all the extra 'hash' of jitter compromised components along the way.
Jitter rejection is what really separates a well designed DAC from the others. I see you own a Prism Sound dScope, can you repeat the equipment graphs by applying, say 30ns or more of jitter to the test tone?
Hi ! Thanks for the education ! I'd like to know which tool you used to create, shape and control jitter for your demos. It would seem a fun creative tool.
What about computer operating systems? Windows is Synchronous whereas Mac OS is Asynchronous. An asynchronous device in windows would be limited to windows synchronocity. Is there a way to measure jitter in a DAW? Thanks.
Julian, it would be wonderful if you could test the optical toslink output of any LG OLED TV made within the last 5 years. There’s been a lot of discussion about allegedly high level of jitter that these TVs output via toslink that causes problems with some DACs. My DAC works fine but I’m wondering if this type of jitter could cause some audible issues. JDS labs has even attempted to measure the SINAD of one of these devices and it only achieved 80dB, however it is possible that they did not take into account the fact that the TV may have been down converting the test signal from 24 bit to 16 bit.
Thanks Julian, these videos of yours have been very informative in clarifying concepts that I thought I knew something about previously, but didn't really understand. As far as jitter, this is a hazy memory, likely from a decade or more previously, that Toslink, could suffer from jitter due to long optical cable runs, poor endpoint connections or cheap optical fiber, due to to signal reflections in the optical fiber itself. Would such actually be jitter or more a form of signal degradation in general at the receiving end?
Ok, but what if you have a signal chain that has 2, 3 or more DA/AD converters? Stacked jitter, like stacked noise across many channels, could add up to a perceivable level in theory right? And then was if the signal chain is also getting jitter from poorly shielded long cables? I’m no expert, but it appears this might have been overlooked. Am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. Noise can not be stuck, by nature, it's random. Even with multiple A/D D/A loops the jitter will stay way below what is audible.
Amazing video mate. Is the grittyness of some 80`s early digital recordings the jitter? Take for example Show Must Go On by Queen, or the whole album a Kind of Magic, it sounds to me far more grittier than its analog predecessors.
Not too sure, distortion in audio components was also quite a bit higher back then. While jitter might add a hint og grunge, I think the most distortion is simply due to the older audio equipment that was used.
The quality of ADCs in general was variable in the early 80s. I've heard some very unpleasantly edgy, 'sharp' digital recordings made through early converters (different from 'clinical' or 'cold' recordings) - fortunately the tech improved fairly quickly.
Very educational vid. But I do wonder if using instruments that sound better with a bit of distortion was the best choice. If I worked at ElectroHarmonix I'd get to work designing a Jitter effect pedal😉
One could use jitter as an interesting sound effect. Maybe ins some metal or punk? If I understand correctly jitter is mostly a concern if you have to use a synchronous conection for applications where latency problems can stack up like live audio. Band recording into their own dps, into the sound system dps into digital amps. Or did I get it wrong?
hey Julian, love your thorough reviews. would you take a look at DJ controllers with integrated interface? they come with 2 separate stereo outs and some with mic- and line- in, enough to test there. the sound quality talk on the dj channels usually doesn't go beyond "symmetric outs = professional" I think that could be an interesting expansion of equipment to test and audience to draw...
I wonder if part of the reason it’s less of a problem is that modern devices have faster clocks, so the amount of “offness” caused by being a cycle late or early is smaller. Let me know if that is/isn’t relevant.
I have a question that is maybe related to this topic: does it matter which device is master/slave in a situation where there is a rather cheap external converter connected to an audio interface via spdif? I shouldn't care right?
The only way to know is to test it, better converters are usually more resilient to a bad clock so it's better to slave them for best performance (numbers not audible)
Hey, I love your videos. Can you tell me why my Audient id14 could be inferior to my buddy’s UA Apollo. I’m interested in a comparison recording audio raw without Apollo DSP plugins. Just direct into the audio interface.
Some of my old cd albums sound similar to this, especially when I using studio headphone I can hear the distortions/jitter like sounds....do that mean my cd player is bad for that?
Shouldn't be, the signal off the CD is extensively buffered and reclocked for the purpose of Reed Solomon correction, and if it had read errors that exceed the Reed Solomon threshold, you'd be hearing bursts of static in silent sections, it gets very very obvious, or it would plain mute the window which cannot be restored, that's common as well, So CD Jitter is not something you need to consider. More likely the distortion is inherent in the bits recorded on the CD, it's how it's been recorded/mastered and "supposed" to sound like. But to be certain you could try copying it with a PC burner, also see if it throws up read errors.
It doesn't seem like 'buzzy' guitars would be the best source with which to identify the audible effects of jitter. After careful listening to various USB Windows audio drivers, it appears that Windows may introduce jitter and other effects when its default audio subsystem resamples and mixes audio from multiple sources internally, before shipping out the results out to USB. The samples being sent out to USB may not actually be the same samples being played on its local hard drive, for example. It doesn't have to be mixing multiple sources simultaneously for its operating system's mixer/resampler to have effects, including jitter in its internal conversion process due to noise, system interrupts, or even just less than audiophile grade attention paid to the audio driver/resampler/mixer development. If there is jitter introduced by the internal mixer/resampler software, it is built in to the output samples and USB buffering won't fix it.
With the intentional aperiodic and periodic jitter audio examples, could that be described as phase modulation/distortion? Or is it something else? Thank you for your thorough explanation and well done!
The periodic jitter is a type of phase distortion, but aperiodic ends up more as random noise (effectively its sort of random sub-phase distortion but random is random).
One device no real worries about jitter. What about if you expand on that as your studio grows? For example my set up is Interface, two 8 channel octopres via ADAT into interface, one two channel preamp via SPIDF. Maybe a video looking into jitter once you have expanded from just your interface? Thanks I enjoyed the video!
LOL you mean billions in clock recovery technology RME have nothing to do with. It is a technology fundamental to you getting broadband. Doing it at audio rates is comparatively childsplay
If you use two interfaces, you absolutely want to sync them, otherwise you run the risk of the clocks slowly drifting apart. Simply connect the interfaces via SPDIF and select it as a clock source in on the receiving one. This way one interface is the master and the other one stays in sync with it.
Good evening Julian - do you know any good ways to eliminate USB interference? For instance, a buzzing interference sound that is heard when moving a USB mouse. I believe this is a grounding issue inherent in USB, and that ferrules on all USB cables connected can help, but may degrade frequency range? Cheers from England!
I've had this problem a lot in the past. Poor motherboard design, grounding and power supply issues often contribute. I minimised by ensuring all my gear was running from a common ground. Sometimes different USB sockets run off different chipsets and some are less affected due to the PCB design and adjacency to CPU data lines or power rails. An adequately designed interface makes a big difference, I don't have any hum/interference issues with fairly common interfaces like Scarletts or Mboxes in daily use.
@@ChristopherWoods My favourite source of USB ground loop is the front panel PCB in many PC ATX enclosures. It's common for it to erroneously connect audio ground and USB ground together. The resulting loop antenna comes out so generous, that it collects unproductive current from any of the numerous sources of PC activity.
@@ChristopherWoods Perhaps I should invest in a more premium motherboard for my next build then. It's a shame there aren't "audiophile" grade lines of motherboards as well as all the "UBER LEET GAMER X EDITION" boards haha...
@@AJDOLDCHANNELARCHIVE It can be a real crapshoot. I've had high-end model motherboards with supposed 'premium' onboard sound which have performed very poorly, and likewise perfect budget systems. Sometimes the USB chipset in use can make a difference (quite a few boards have multiple USB chipsets running different pairs of ports).
Great video… however, I would argue that a sample of distorted guitar probably isn’t the best choice when trying to specifically discern extra distortion!
Between you, Jim Lill and a few others you have pretty much destroyed any notion that recording music has to be expensive. And this is a good thing. It forces creators to focus on the art, not the tools. Thank you.
Thanks!! Agreed, Jim has some really cool videos.
Jim is amazing. It's fun how many forum myths of old fall apart when you start focusing on what actually makes a difference and the science behind it
I built my first DAW in 1999/2000. You had to pay quite a bit to get good convertors, and you had to pay more to get converters that were located in the breakout box (I drooled over the MOTU 1824 iirc), because converters close to the PCI bridge would pick up noise. And the budget converters weren’t guaranteed to be shielded. Anything available today in the recording space is orders of magnitude better than hardware 25 years ago. The playing field is more level than it has ever been, and it’s just going to get better.
Very well said!
Yeah, everything is so good nowadays. But... some are chasing some past times characters. And putting multiple so-so devices in chain might lead to audible problems sooner.
I've always wondered what "Jitter" is. Julian should run a series called "Everything you wanted to know about digital audio, but were afraid to ask". 👍
Julian, this video was Perfect just like most interfaces jitter performance. Thank you so much for the great information and demonstrations.
You're very much welcome!
Useful video! Congratulations on 100k+ subscribers!❤
Thank you! 😃
I wouldn't worry about "The Jitter Bug" folks.
The primary thing that is ruining "your audio" is a lack of creativity.
WE are focusing on the wrong "things". Focus-right
Try and produce techno and see if groove killing jitter will let you draw the same conclusion.
Amen
Ironically focusrite interfaces are pretty bad in jitter and driver stability
@@vadimmartynyuk Julian showed Focusrite performance data. Present your claims.
@@vadimmartynyuk Maybe more than some other interfaces, but not enough to actually cause a problem for literally anyone making music. If you are deciding between interfaces based on amount of jitter, you're *looking* for a problem and picking based on random numbers on a random graph rather than using your ears.
I am not an audiophile. I am a vo artist , and Ihad to teach myself audio editing for my home studio. Many of your videos have helped my journey along the way. You have a way of explaining your process without being condescending or all knowing. you display facts and graphs an interesting narrative that allow even technoobies like myself understand what the topic is and what the issues are. thank you for taking the time and sharing your passion and knowledge
Amazing content as always! Thank you
Your videos are pure gold. Thanks for everything you do!
Hey mister Julian Krause! Do you have your "audio interface tier list" -stream or the final chart somewhere? I would really appreciate it. Sorry for comment that is unrelated to the video.
thanks for all you do, GREAT CONTENT !!!!!
Some years ago I purchased a "JitterBug" from AudioQuest specifically BECAUSE I believed it was pure snake oil, and I felt my first deliberate "audiophile head-fi" setup would be incomplete without a dash of such. As far as audiophile snake oil goes, it seemed like a pretty cheap option for such pure stuff lol.
Love this channel. Love Krausian humor. Better therapy than "Therapy", and less risk of snake oil than that realm too.
Audio Science Review testing found that the Jitterbug actually INCREASED jitter. Not just snake oil, but actively counterproductive.
@@scorpioassmodeusgtx1811 *shrug* I'm relieved to hear that I didn't get a watered down dash of snake oil. Also, don't really care, per this video.
EDIT: Skimmed the ASR review. The conclusion appears to be that it does nothing audible, and barely anything even confidently measurable, as is the conclusion of several other reviews linked around the ASR forums. I didn't see any mention of increasing jitter in the conclusions. Leaving my prized snake oil in the signal chain.
@@attaboyBrad I believe the increase in jitter was only observed when combined with one DAC, namely the the Schiit Modi 2. But even then the differences were well below what could be considered audible. It's safe to say it has no practical positive or negative effect.
Another amazingly-informative video from Julian, that i didn't know i was missing in my life before this! 😅
I always thought of jitter as just another effect to be added when using effects that intentionally reduce samplerate and bitrate over a channel. I found a little added jitter to be pleasing in the cases were I use it. A little jitter makes bitcrunching sound more organic, and less like static
isn't that dither? a way to mask quantization noises. Try oversampling instead
@@miquelmarti6537 this is just in context of using an Ableton Live effect over a single channel to add some grit, say for a bass track. Sorry I wasn't being clear.
Oversampling wouldn't really add much in this case.
I mean, the idea is intentionally to reduce samplerate.
You mean "dither, it only makes THD looks nicer but it's way below what is audible. If you think you can hear its effect you are not testing it right.
Thanks for sharing science-backed facts :) ! I can only agree with the content of this video, and I'm happy to see content like that that participates to sharing the truth.
A fellow home studio youtuber from France
Thank you so much for making this video!
I have been arguing with people about this here on youtube, who spend lots of money in fear of the mighty jitter.
Looking at your jitter results, I would say those noise in the graphs most probably are a result of other problems than jitter.
Jitter was a problem 30 years ago, when they just started to make digital audio devices. I do not think anyone still have any devices which have any jitter problem anymore, as it is not a difficult problem to solve.
The only time you can have jitter problems, if your device is just faulty.
True
I dont know how you made this video without the words ' *clock recovery* ' but i'm quite grateful that you demonstrated just how astonishingly good the clock recovery on my Audient Evo16 is even on SPDIF in a worst case scenario, makes me worry a lot less about how the optical jitter is these days (i didnt think it was an issue, but i feel lazy not using the word clock lol)
I'm worried I might become and audiophile but.. isn't just knowing the small degrees to which you can go make you an audiophile as well? The depth of knowledge. I don't know man, its a very fun rabbit hole. as my quest continues I have one more question.. is there a positive term for audiophile or is it simply .."audio engineer" LOL or "audio explorer" I used the term "audio surfing" to describe getting my first truly mixed track. so smooth... it was like I was riding the audio waves. thanks for the info sir. V/R ~Bobby
@@bobbybird3677 Thanks so much for the tip! I think it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Audiophile is a positive term for me. The most important thing is after going down a rabbit hole to pull one self out again and enjoy the music. Knowing technical stuff to not get lured into snake-oil products is important but so is taking the time to sit down and enjoying your system. That’s what being an Audiophile about. Enjoy the music!! 😀
I have a old keyboard soldered an external Clock input to. So i can add Jitter as an effekt and or pitch it up and down and give it a lowFi sound
Thank you for making this great video! Years ago, my mastering engineer made jitter out to be this really terrible thing. But that was years ago. And I've always wondered about it since. But because of your great video... no more worries! Keep up the great work!
Great video! Perhaps a future topic of clocking between multiple digital interfaces is in order? Many people get jitter/clocking issues confused and it's probably because the understanding of what jitter actually is isn't widely known (hopefully this video puts that to bed).
That is true ! Hey Julian why did you not do a review of the new AVID Mbox Studio ?
Lowest I can go for my 48 year old ears is -72dB. So I think I'm in the clear, lol. Another reason why I also don't worry about whether my music is 16bit or 24bit.
depends on what you are considering "zero"
Thank you so much for dispelling so many lies and unfounded "fears" about the jitter issue, especially those related to high-end DACs. I was seriously considering shelling out more bucks for the Eversolo Master Edition steamer DAC due to its more accurate femto clock than the standard edition, but after watching your video I'm more convinced that the standard Eversolo edition is the way to go--especially since I'm not an audiophile nor do I possess a super, high-end sound equipment at home. Thanks again for posting! It was a very enlightening video.
Your reviews are fantastic. An unrelated subject suggestion: after watching many reviews for budget interfaces, it would be nice to give example scenarios of what type of user would take the most advantage of their particular features. That would make your revires from a 9.9 output to an 11 score output in the consumer scale. Thank you for your excellent work
My PC was next to the microphone arm and when I folded it it stayed close. Now I have moved the PC and I no longer have any problems. Thanks to your reviews I bought a Focusrite Clarett 2pre and I'm pleased with it. Nowadays there are a lot of people doing podcasts, It would be a great idea to review audio production solutions for podcasters like the Mackie DLZ Creator or RØDECaster Pro II. That would also be a fascinating video. Love your channel. 👍
We, the committee of Guinness World Records hereby announce: Julian Krause officially is the person, who said the word "jitter" more often than anybody else - ever! 🏆Congrats, Julian! 🤭 Thx for your excellent vids & cheers from Hamburg! LG cosmic
Hey Julian, could you review the Neumann MT48? Really curious about the headphone outs!
A lot of information yes, but wrong conclusions. Reclocking brings very obvious audible improvements, even in modern DACs, but according to your video it is negligible. In other words, DCS, Esoteric, Antipodes, to mention a few, are all wrong, but you are right. Yeah right. I believe my ears above and beyond any measurement.
Without people like you, all those brands would be bankrupt.
@@StephanBuchin I studied and work in digital A/V and telecom electronics and thought just like you. It justified my inability to acquire high-end equipment, let alone test and compare it (not implying this is your situation). After decades, I finally had the chance to A/B systems on my own house (used gear from a friend's trade-in hi-fi store). Differences can be huge and obvious. Sometimes they are not.
I appreciate your honesty, however you may want to personally test several high-end devices. My personal experience changed my mind significantly. Snake oil and overpriced gear exist, but not everything expensive is snake oil.
@@vmptyIf one can measure something, one may (!) also be able to hear it, often enough not even that. If however one cannot even measure something, no way there will be anything audible to detect as measurement systems simply way exceed humans' hearing abilities.
If your listening tests are not blind they don't worth anything, and if you think they do, you need to learn about biases and critical thinking.
The brand you mentioned uses tools to design their products. Human ears are a poor way to judge audio fidelity.
They are not "wrong", they say you will get better numbers and that it sounds great, this is all true, but they usually don't say the better numbers make it sound better. They usually avoid these kinds of statements or they simply lie.
Jitter is measurable easily as noise, This is its only side effect. It's not possible to hear jitter with any modern audio converter.
Wordclocking is only good for clocking multiple units, this is why they exist. If anything they can only degrade the "numbers" but it will not be audible.
@xfghffhfg I respect your science first approach, but you need also to respect the emotional approach. The sound that touches my emotions is what counts for me. In that scenario, I could not care less for biases and measurements.
Somehow your analysis is deep yet not long-winded. A perfect performance.
Well he is German!
He skipped over everything that mattered.
@@Pete.across.the.street What do you have in mind that was skipped? Honestly curious.
@@CharlesBurnsPrime he over simplified it. It's much more complex than he made it out to be. That - 120db gets amplified. If you do actual a/b listening test you can tell the differences. Not so much that b you hear the jitter, but you can tell when there's a lack of jitter.
@@Pete.across.the.street Interesting. I would ask that you suggest a test for Julian to consider. He seems to be the kind of person that can share corrections or exceptions to claims without ego problems. I would love to understand this topic better as it is often discussed with regards to digital audio.
I really like how the jitter sounds like, when it's not that high, could use as an grit effect.
But that pereodic jitter sounds like an sp-1200
you should try my plugin, NEL. It's a vibrato plugin, but on high octave settings its perlin noise modulator would essentially produce jitter
I was thinking the same, that metallic harmonic on the periodic jitter has a really ring mod bite to it.
@@mycosys yeah it's kinda pleasant to the ears to listen too aswell
already hunting for a max4live device to rip a jitter-controlled resampler from lol @@thebloodminister988
Yeah, there’s also a plug-in called decimort by D16 that has a jitter control
Good explanation JK!
I do believe these statements are true for probably 99% of user listening scenarios, but strongly disagree about it being inaudible. I have experienced it myself on high end systems. DDC especially, if you can't hear the difference you don't have system that is revealing enough.
... that system including the human hearing capabilities which is exactly the reason why most of that audiophile voodoo is absolute nonsense. The ears are simply not good enough which for not too few people seems to be a fact very hard to accept.
Those DDCs are real-life satire. Even IF they would have any effective audible impact, it wouldn't exactly speak for the DAC apparently then being in need to get a signal handed on a silver platter by them. Any decent DAC worth its salt has jitter rejection and whatnot already integrated so I would rather spend money on that part and certainly not any half-voodoo device in between if it has to be that way (RME ADI-2 with its FS-reclocking, Benchmark DACs, etc. and already that is most probably halfway voodoo as inaudible anyway)
Scientifically it's not possible to hear jitter. The only side effect of jitter is noise, measurable noise. If the test was not a blind A/B/C test multiple times with a measurement to exclude issues it's not a scientific statement. It's more probable that some bias was involved. Probably consumer bias and/or confirmation bias
@@xfghffhfg I agree, since it's only a derivation from the ideal clock rate. However, can't the side effect also manifest itself as distortion and not noise only if it is correlated with the input signal? One could argue that distortion is also a form of noise, but usually it is thought of being uncorrected and random.
I guess we both share the opinion that this topic is blown entirely out of proportion and usual certainly not a major issue, be it noise or distortion.
@@little-endian5957 Anything that adds or subtracts to the signal can be considered distortion. Jitter only adds noise, this has been proven by nul testing.
Theory a side, have you tried hearing it yourself?
Very interesting. What about jitter introduced by streaming services, ei: less than ideal Internet speeds, caché and buffering. I suspect that's Why physical media or local files seem to sound better than streaming, IMO. Thanks for the great video!
Streaming services uses packets of data. As demonstrated in the video, packetized data is totally impervious to jitter. The difference in quality is compression.
Streaming audio is put into a local buffer. The audio is played directly from the audio buffer which is local memory and, therefore, no more susceptible to jitter than a local file (which, incidentally, is also streamed, just from a local media rather than a remote one).
"Buffering" occurs when the data stream isn't fast enough to keep the local buffers full. In that case you will get obvious dropouts or pauses in the stream. If the stream is fast enough (which, for streaming audio, that's normally the case) then you won't get buffering.
Either way, you won't get jitter.
streaming services use lossy compression
spotify for example uses the vorbis codec
@@djentledjosh which has nothing to do with jitter.
@@KeithMilner correct
i was responding to the top comment which said that network jitter could cause quality issues with streaming services which is not the case
Bloody amazing content, mate. Keep on the great work! In a tech language way, you are the Glenn Fricker of audio interfaces, mythbusting sort of. For example, when it comes to SM7B -> SM57 discussion, instead of telling the same thing again and again as I did during the last 20 years, I just send a link of your video about the matter. It perfectly aligns to my experience.
Ages ago when I worked for a broadcast company we tested AD/DA chips and used the same measures so although I'm not an engineer, your interface tests tell me everything about these new audio devices. Clear tech data and language, I really like that.
When it comes to clocking / sync, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts about how differences between un-synced devices occur and how to solve timing issues between, for example, an audio interface and different cameras.
I am sort of reminded of the old analog days. I used a high-end open reel unit running 15 IPS; I used dbx noise reduction in many of those recordings. That meant, adding the 30 or so dB noise reduction to the already high signal to noise of my recorder (75dB or so at 15 IPS), I was running about 100 DB or a little more signal to noise ratio. Great specs; but if you listened carefully, you could hear the noise in between the notes on quiet passages. Thing is, if you’re just listening to the music, you never hear it. Your video makes me feel that way about jitter. Thanks!
That noise was really audible actually.
@@StephanBuchin It can be. When dbx first came out, people were being told to way under-record, so that there would be less distortion. The dbx would take care of the hiss that way. dbx put in their instructions that you should record with peaks at or near 0 dB; that way, the noise control would be the best. Recording that way, you could still hear a little noise, especially on classical music. But things like jazz groups, rock, electronic Pop, the music covered the hiss pretty well.
As extremely correct as you are about jitter, using a highly distorted guitar as an example just doesn't make sense. Ages ago, when testing audio systems, Smokin' by Boston was one of my favorite sound check songs. Then I got to thinking, is my audio system accurately reproducing all the distortion?
Hey Julian, I’ve seen your Video about the Elgato Wave XLR interface. Now that Elgato have added the function to add vst plugins I wondered what you think of it now. If you could respond to this comment or do a video about it I would be very happy thank you.
Wonderful - thanks for all your videos, keep them coming.
This is my favorite UA-cam channel
Just goes to show that sometimes we focus too much on the phantom details, stuff that really doesn't matter. Let's all be more creative and focus on the art instead.
Awesome and informative :)
This wrong idea of worrying about jitter these days comes from the peddlers who want to sell you their products... There is so much wasted money by poor audiophiles that believe those unscrupulous snake oil sellers...
There are 4 types of USB data transfer. Audio data transfer is done using Isochronous mode. This is a one way data transfer from source to destination like streams of data. There no way to detect error at the transmission level if the there is a timing variation while sampling by the receiver. The only way the receiver can detect error is by detecting PCM data encoding format by detecting the changes in voltage. It will reclock in needed. However there is no way to send request to sender to resent the correct data. Hence the receiver uses interpolation to set the data. This interpolation will depend of the DAC designer. This is one of the reason different DAC sounds different even when all other parameters remain same.
Clock disparity between USB host and device does not result in erroneous (misclocked) data transmission because USB uses NRZI encoding to interleave clock and data. Bit errors do occur, isochronous transfer just like any includes a CRC checksum, which allows one bit error correction per 1ms window. Sometimes, devices do not implement CRC checking for incoming data, but with modern USB processors, you expect that all of these current devices do. At higher error rates, the error leaks into the output. There is indeed no retransmission possibility with iso, because the transmission and processing time window is already spent, but if you had errors at mere fullspeed (12Mbaud) that were uncorrectible more frequent than once every few days, you'd be THIS close to the device regularly falling off the bus, so you don't have to worry about it.
And interpolation... you're just throwing words around at this point.
@@SianaGearzThe lovely "Interpolation" had already been roped into the voodoo nonsense sphere since the good old audio CD era. Whenever the jitter voodoo wasn't enough for a pseudo-explanation, the next claim was that due to the oh so imperfect and overwhelmed error-correction so the player had to perform interpolation all the time - which simply isn't true. In most cases, it never occurs on the C2 stage resulting in uncorrectable errors for proper media and even if, it is hardly all the time but for a brief moment.
I have a DAC very similar to the $8 one shown on this video. I bought to convert digital coaxial into analog RCA and I haven't noticed any jitter or other kind of noise or artifact. Before this video, jitter was only mentioned and sometimes describe in ways I only had an idea about. Thank you!
We love your videos. And have something we would love you to cover:)
I think it was you (can't remember which video and I may be wrong entirely) who said once that digitally-controlled preamps tend to have higher noise floors and that does seem to be born out in your measurements (with the Ultralite being an outlier), but I'd love a video exploring the topic. Is it a limitation of the control method or is it more of an issue of circuit design? Is there something that makes it so that a theoretically perfect fully analog preamp will always have lower noise vs a theoretically perfect digitally-controlled preamp?
Hello Julian please make a vídeo about neve 88m interface
Hedoesnt review expensive audio interface like UAD Apollo, Avid Carbon, Steinberg AXR4 or Neve 88M
Thank you Julian for the great explanation on this topic! In a forum on Gearspace I saw a discussion about operating systems on computers re-sampling audio and therefore leading to audible quality differences during playback. Does it have to do with Jitter as well or is there another reason for the audible loss in quality? Do you have a video on this topic or would that be something you'd do a video about? There are apps like Audirvana that promise to get around the re-sampling issue and to increase the playback quality.
The behringer UM2 is their cheapest (very cheap) and only does 16 bits even so its understandable that it doesnt perform as good as many others while still acceptable in this test. I would never recommend a 16 bit interface to anyone either, 24 bits is the go to if you want to make any kind of serious recording really.
6:20 how do you introduce jitter to these signals? How are these measured? Can you generate a tone in software to audio interface, and then record it also with the same interface to make this measurement?
Very well put argument and demonstrated evidence to debunk the snake oil sellers. Congratulations and thanks for all the clarity you bring to us on audio devices.
Hi Julian have you got plans to review the new Zoom H6essential and other essential lines from Zoom ?
I did not think my system suffered from jitter but others make it sound so inevitable that you think 'maybe I have never heard what streaming sounds like with no jitter'
I have just discovered your channel (subscribed) .I had a look at your channel hoping to see a video about hifi network switches.
As they are another product I do not understand, they have to plug into a Reuter so haw can they improve on one?
Have you done one if not could you?
thanks. PS my next upgrade will be to replace my wiim pro, do you have any advice on quality streamers to consider?
I am using , from Mac Mini through USB, a Matrix SPDIF2 (reclocker) connected through IIS to Matrix Element X2 (dac/amp), with settings on synchronous mode. For me, it is an improvement of the sound . I don’t know if it is because jitter or ground , but it is doing a nice job . In this way, the sound is clearer , any sibilance is gone and bass is stronger and more defined in synchronous mode , than in asynchronous mode directly from usb. I really don’t think is a placebo, but who knows ?😊 I am using headphones.
Blind test it A/B/C
You should purchase a good ddc or have someone lend you one to see if you hear a difference, and if you do hear a difference you could try to explain what it's doing to the audio signal.
Or explains biases and the importance of critical thinking :)
Great video! I'm interested in using multichannel DACs for active loudspeaker use as a hobby. Fear of jitter drives me towards a USB DAC but it would be more convenient for many, I think, if one could just use an HDMI input to a receiver - DAC, volume control, and amps (OK weedy ones) all in one box. Could you comment on HDMI jitter with 4. 6 or 8 channels of PCM at various sample rates?
Hey julian, amazing review as always. Could you please do a review of the YAMAHA AG06 mixer/audio interface?
Awesome video. Anyway, I was wondering if you'll be taking a look at the new MOTU 828? It seems like an expanded version of the UltraLite mk5, and I hope it lives up to its quality!
I would love if you could make those audio samples downloadable to get around youtube compression and duplexing. They would be great to test out and demonstrate on our gear as a normal/high res file or even burn to cd.
Does jitter have any impact on other components at all-since it's an artifact of conversion or transmission (SPDIF), does it compromise or degrade/affect the performance of other components at all downstream in any way like transistors or other amplification components, feed back circuits, tubes, (even theoretically) etc?
The side effects of jitter - even if allowed to persist until the DAC and not cancelled - end at the DAC reconstruction filter and at that point it's just sound, distorted sound but without any suspiciously bad characteristics, unlike say clipping.
@@SianaGearz thanks for the intel. I assumed there would be some effective filtering at some point, but wondered if all the extra 'hash' of jitter compromised components along the way.
Another excellent video ----- thank Julian ---- revealing the truth
Jitter rejection is what really separates a well designed DAC from the others. I see you own a Prism Sound dScope, can you repeat the equipment graphs by applying, say 30ns or more of jitter to the test tone?
Hi ! Thanks for the education ! I'd like to know which tool you used to create, shape and control jitter for your demos. It would seem a fun creative tool.
What about computer operating systems? Windows is Synchronous whereas Mac OS is Asynchronous. An asynchronous device in windows would be limited to windows synchronocity. Is there a way to measure jitter in a DAW? Thanks.
Thanks Julian for all the great work! Could you review the Neve 88m ? Thanks!
How about a video on the difference of using ADAT with and without using word clock
Nice KEF's. Perfect for reference if reverb and any spacial cues.
Julian, it would be wonderful if you could test the optical toslink output of any LG OLED TV made within the last 5 years. There’s been a lot of discussion about allegedly high level of jitter that these TVs output via toslink that causes problems with some DACs. My DAC works fine but I’m wondering if this type of jitter could cause some audible issues. JDS labs has even attempted to measure the SINAD of one of these devices and it only achieved 80dB, however it is possible that they did not take into account the fact that the TV may have been down converting the test signal from 24 bit to 16 bit.
Good man,just subbed to your channel.
I have LOL'd as soon I have seen Behringer in the test.
Thanks Julian, these videos of yours have been very informative in clarifying concepts that I thought I knew something about previously, but didn't really understand. As far as jitter, this is a hazy memory, likely from a decade or more previously, that Toslink, could suffer from jitter due to long optical cable runs, poor endpoint connections or cheap optical fiber, due to to signal reflections in the optical fiber itself. Would such actually be jitter or more a form of signal degradation in general at the receiving end?
Nah you get to worry about bit errors way way way before you have to worry about jitter.
Ok, but what if you have a signal chain that has 2, 3 or more DA/AD converters? Stacked jitter, like stacked noise across many channels, could add up to a perceivable level in theory right?
And then was if the signal chain is also getting jitter from poorly shielded long cables?
I’m no expert, but it appears this might have been overlooked.
Am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. Noise can not be stuck, by nature, it's random. Even with multiple A/D D/A loops the jitter will stay way below what is audible.
Amazing video mate. Is the grittyness of some 80`s early digital recordings the jitter? Take for example Show Must Go On by Queen, or the whole album a Kind of Magic, it sounds to me far more grittier than its analog predecessors.
Not too sure, distortion in audio components was also quite a bit higher back then. While jitter might add a hint og grunge, I think the most distortion is simply due to the older audio equipment that was used.
The quality of ADCs in general was variable in the early 80s. I've heard some very unpleasantly edgy, 'sharp' digital recordings made through early converters (different from 'clinical' or 'cold' recordings) - fortunately the tech improved fairly quickly.
Very educational vid.
But I do wonder if using instruments that sound better with a bit of distortion was the best choice.
If I worked at ElectroHarmonix I'd get to work designing a Jitter effect pedal😉
One could use jitter as an interesting sound effect. Maybe ins some metal or punk?
If I understand correctly jitter is mostly a concern if you have to use a synchronous conection for applications where latency problems can stack up like live audio. Band recording into their own dps, into the sound system dps into digital amps. Or did I get it wrong?
hey Julian, love your thorough reviews. would you take a look at DJ controllers with integrated interface?
they come with 2 separate stereo outs and some with mic- and line- in, enough to test there.
the sound quality talk on the dj channels usually doesn't go beyond "symmetric outs = professional"
I think that could be an interesting expansion of equipment to test and audience to draw...
Have you done any videos on summing mixers Julian ?
I wonder if part of the reason it’s less of a problem is that modern devices have faster clocks, so the amount of “offness” caused by being a cycle late or early is smaller. Let me know if that is/isn’t relevant.
The best explanation ever!
I was hoping this would get into an explanation of wordclocking, but did I nod off for that part? 🤔😬
I have a question that is maybe related to this topic: does it matter which device is master/slave in a situation where there is a rather cheap external converter connected to an audio interface via spdif? I shouldn't care right?
The only way to know is to test it, better converters are usually more resilient to a bad clock so it's better to slave them for best performance (numbers not audible)
Hey, I love your videos. Can you tell me why my Audient id14 could be inferior to my buddy’s UA Apollo. I’m interested in a comparison recording audio raw without Apollo DSP plugins. Just direct into the audio interface.
don't worry, it will sound the same.
Some of my old cd albums sound similar to this, especially when I using studio headphone I can hear the distortions/jitter like sounds....do that mean my cd player is bad for that?
Shouldn't be, the signal off the CD is extensively buffered and reclocked for the purpose of Reed Solomon correction, and if it had read errors that exceed the Reed Solomon threshold, you'd be hearing bursts of static in silent sections, it gets very very obvious, or it would plain mute the window which cannot be restored, that's common as well, So CD Jitter is not something you need to consider. More likely the distortion is inherent in the bits recorded on the CD, it's how it's been recorded/mastered and "supposed" to sound like.
But to be certain you could try copying it with a PC burner, also see if it throws up read errors.
It doesn't seem like 'buzzy' guitars would be the best source with which to identify the audible effects of jitter.
After careful listening to various USB Windows audio drivers, it appears that Windows may introduce jitter and other effects when its default audio subsystem resamples and mixes audio from multiple sources internally, before shipping out the results out to USB. The samples being sent out to USB may not actually be the same samples being played on its local hard drive, for example.
It doesn't have to be mixing multiple sources simultaneously for its operating system's mixer/resampler to have effects, including jitter in its internal conversion process due to noise, system interrupts, or even just less than audiophile grade attention paid to the audio driver/resampler/mixer development. If there is jitter introduced by the internal mixer/resampler software, it is built in to the output samples and USB buffering won't fix it.
Jitter is just noise.
Great vid.
The use of network switch in audio is not related to jitter, but the ground separation between noisy network equipments and audio system.
With the intentional aperiodic and periodic jitter audio examples, could that be described as phase modulation/distortion? Or is it something else? Thank you for your thorough explanation and well done!
The periodic jitter is a type of phase distortion, but aperiodic ends up more as random noise (effectively its sort of random sub-phase distortion but random is random).
Excellent job! Succinct. i appreciated the graphs demonstrating you thoroughly investigated jitter for us. Convinced me to subscribe.
Excellent explanation, thank you 👍
Jitter is the sound of your wallet emptying.
One device no real worries about jitter. What about if you expand on that as your studio grows? For example my set up is Interface, two 8 channel octopres via ADAT into interface, one two channel preamp via SPIDF. Maybe a video looking into jitter once you have expanded from just your interface? Thanks I enjoyed the video!
it's not really an issue, it's never was.
Does it mean something like Topping HS02 is snake oil?
If Julian was born way earlier he could have been a member of Kraftwerk.
RADIOAKTIVITÄT!!!
Thanks to RME Steady-clock technology Jitter is no longer a problem since many years.
LOL you mean billions in clock recovery technology RME have nothing to do with. It is a technology fundamental to you getting broadband. Doing it at audio rates is comparatively childsplay
Sir which audio interface better , focusrite Scarlett 2i2 4th gen or audient id14 mkII wait for your valuable response
Both are great for the price point, buy whichever suits your requirements the most.
but what about phase dependent multitrack audio like layered sound?
I remember using a behringer DEQ2496 that was complete trash when converting spdif/aes3 input to analog output.
Thank you for this video.
Thank you for touching on this snake oil topic. Very good presentation as ever.
damn that topping looked ridiculously good
So in saying this, do I still have to have one of the interfaces syncing both devices? or can I let one "freerun" without a sync?
Using SPDIF
If you use two interfaces, you absolutely want to sync them, otherwise you run the risk of the clocks slowly drifting apart. Simply connect the interfaces via SPDIF and select it as a clock source in on the receiving one. This way one interface is the master and the other one stays in sync with it.
my Walkman mistreated ears only became slightly annoyed only with high settings if at all.
Good evening Julian - do you know any good ways to eliminate USB interference? For instance, a buzzing interference sound that is heard when moving a USB mouse. I believe this is a grounding issue inherent in USB, and that ferrules on all USB cables connected can help, but may degrade frequency range?
Cheers from England!
I've had this problem a lot in the past. Poor motherboard design, grounding and power supply issues often contribute. I minimised by ensuring all my gear was running from a common ground. Sometimes different USB sockets run off different chipsets and some are less affected due to the PCB design and adjacency to CPU data lines or power rails. An adequately designed interface makes a big difference, I don't have any hum/interference issues with fairly common interfaces like Scarletts or Mboxes in daily use.
@@ChristopherWoods My favourite source of USB ground loop is the front panel PCB in many PC ATX enclosures. It's common for it to erroneously connect audio ground and USB ground together. The resulting loop antenna comes out so generous, that it collects unproductive current from any of the numerous sources of PC activity.
@@ChristopherWoods Perhaps I should invest in a more premium motherboard for my next build then. It's a shame there aren't "audiophile" grade lines of motherboards as well as all the "UBER LEET GAMER X EDITION" boards haha...
@@AJDOLDCHANNELARCHIVE It can be a real crapshoot. I've had high-end model motherboards with supposed 'premium' onboard sound which have performed very poorly, and likewise perfect budget systems. Sometimes the USB chipset in use can make a difference (quite a few boards have multiple USB chipsets running different pairs of ports).
@@SianaGearz I've shared in that pain 😅
Great video… however, I would argue that a sample of distorted guitar probably isn’t the best choice when trying to specifically discern extra distortion!
Jitter is only added noise.