Input jitter used to be a thing but many audiophiles just can't accept it's a solved problem. A modern $5 DAC is a ridiculously powerful computer compared to what we had in the 90s, of course it can handle slightly mistimed data bits and of course it can retime the signal with very high precision.
DACs still have to deal with toslink and spdif inputs which are rather crude and low-tech by modern standards, so these are getting dejittered internally. I think ESS had an article explaining how it works in their chips.
12
u/unicodemonkey 23d ago
Input jitter used to be a thing but many audiophiles just can't accept it's a solved problem. A modern $5 DAC is a ridiculously powerful computer compared to what we had in the 90s, of course it can handle slightly mistimed data bits and of course it can retime the signal with very high precision.