| I know there has been controversial discussion of this here, but anything upstream of a DAC, i.e. anything digital can have only one metric of quality: jitter (assuming bit perfection, which these days is assured). Unlike anything in the analogue domain, which no reductive measure can capture synoptically, a digital channel cannot be better--physically cannot--except by reducing jitter, provided adequate isolation of any coincident analogue noise from the source (such as can be achieved by say optical decoupling). So the hunt for the ideal digital source should be a mechanical one, so to speak. But from the DAC on, included, all bets are off. |
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