Lee Scoggins
Senior HTF Member
Various blind tests have in fact been done in the audio industry. Unsurprisingly (to someone who knows the technical details), it turns out that people who think differences from transports, cables, etc. are "blatantly obvious" in non-blind listening, are often completely unable to pick out those same differences in blind testing.:rolleyes
Ian,
This is just your opinion, and may be based partly on DBTs that others have conducted, but there are very real differences in transports and many other things including digital cable which also exhibits jitter.
I am no engineer but I have engineered or assistant produced over 14 albums, mostly for audiophile and mainstream labels. We have noted and adjusted for transport differences in our playback chain in most of these albums, several of which won industry awards for their clean sound.
(This also addresses Lance's comments: )
Jitter can be detected as smearing the music down to 20 Picoseconds. Recently, I have been doing orchestral and chamber music ensembles where we record in hi-rez PCM on Alessis Masterlink hard drives at 88.2khz. To get better sound at a recent concert we added a Lucid Audio GenX 96 master clock that drove down jitter from 200ps to 20ps. The difference was more detail, more "air" around the instruments, and an overall improvement in focus.
It was suprising to me initially but I have heard similar sonic improvements as we lowered jitter in the recording and playback chains at Chesky Records. The reading of 20 picoseconds is extremely low in technical terms but one has to keep in mind that the human brain is an amazing processing engine capable of hearing very subtle nuances through its neural network retrieval and analysis.
I am recording my music samples at 200 and 20 ps for a test CD so if you want to listen what each sounds like, I would be happy to send you a copy for evaluation.