Hi, on another forum, mastering engineer Barry Diament is making claims about the jitter-immunity of the Benchmark.  I'd be interested in your response.

The thread is here but it takes a while to turn to Benchmark:  http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=215509

The post is here: http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=5437866&postcount=129

Note, the context of discussion is whether data-identical discs manufactured at different plants or in different ways or copied to CD-R with various methods sound different when played back on CD players [and I'd love an opinion on that too].

And I quote:

...Claims of "jitter immunity" are marketing terms not engineering terms.  In other words, at this point in time, there ain't no such thing.

Put another way, if jitter is the reason for apparent sonic differences between data identical discs, such DACs should remove the differences.  In my experience, no DAC removes the differences.  So, either jitter is not the cause (though I believe it is [I]at least part[/I] of the cause) or DACs don't do anything to improve the situation.

Re-clocking DACs are another issue.  (By the way, the Metric Halo DACs work at native rates, not reclocked ones.)  Something like the Benchmark, perform on-the-fly sample rate conversion (if I recall correctly, in this case, to 100k or 110k!).  This will indeed [I]diminish[/I] jitter but to my ears, at the cost of the spurious harmonics added to the signal by the on-the-fly SRC.  So we end up with jitter numbers that seem lower and a brightened, hardened sound in exchange. (Some reviewers write of this as "added detail" - which of course, is something not present on the original, so I call it what I take it to be: distortion.)  It is a personal call as to which might be preferable.

Best regards,

Barry

www.soundkeeperrecordings.com

www.barrydiamentaudio.com