On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, John van Ommen wrote:

I'm glad to hear that MAD sounds good on your PC. You stated that you were closer to audio nirvana because you had bypassed the DACs in your SB Live. While improving DACs is certainly a good thing, note that this doesn't eliminate what is potentially the biggest problem with digital audio, jitter.

A definition of jitter: http://www.feurio.com/English/faq/faq_vocable_jitter.shtml

This is jitter during ripping. Ripping software does mutliple reads of the same data area until it finds its place again to eliminate it. See e.g. the cdparanoia docs.

I have a box that re-clocks the digital signal, a Monarchy Audio Digital Interface Processor. This seems to restore the pace to music, and also smooths out the treble. I used to use it with my desktop PC, but found that their was a greater improvement when I hooked it up to my laptop. This is primarily because my computer's audio colletions is mostly on my 60gig hard drive, whereas I listen to MP3 CDs on my laptop almost exclusively. And of course, a hard drive would have *much* lower jitter than a CD-ROM, because it's a much more stable mechanism.

This is different. The mass storage device of an mp3 file is irrelevent as long as it (and the system) is fast enough to keep the sound card fed (or you get dropouts, BIG gaps of silence). The clocking of the DACs occurs on the soundcard and is dependent on the stability of the soundcard's crystal oscillator.

As for what you hear, if you are taking digital output from your laptop and reclocking then you are bypassing the laptops DACs completely. You may be hearing low quality DACs or related D/A hardware on the laptop.