discovery hifi forum

discoveryhifi

Over the last couple of years digital audio has truly moved to the fore of music reproduction and the plethora of DACs being released in this time is quite staggering. One word keeps appearing in all DAC reviews, and that is Jitter.

Jitter in simple terms, is timing accuracy of the digital data stream, and the lower the level of timing errors the better. All DACs that are brave enough to offer up the specifications for Jitter of their products talk in Picoseconds of accuracy.

So what exactly is a Picosecond? According to Wikipedia: "That is one trillionth, or one millionth of one millionth of a second, or 0.000 000 000 001 seconds. A picosecond is to one second as one second is to 31,700 years.

Some of the better DACs currently offer up jitter accuracy of 300-600 picoseconds. That to me at least sounds pretty darn accurate. But like all audio products, specifications count and the better the jitter figure the better the DAC performance so the march is on to be even more accurate.

But what could be more accurate? 100 picoseconds? No, not good enough it seems..what about 1 picosecond then? No, not good enough. We are moving into the next realm!

At the CES Trade Show in Las Vegas to be held in January 2012, Calyx will be releasing their Super DAC, a DAC with jitter so low it will be measured in Femtoseconds!

So what is a femtosecond? Again, lets see what Wikipedia has to say: "That is one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth of a second. For context, a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.7 million years.

Now that sounds significantly more accurate, but will that translate into better sound? We will have to wait for the first DACs to land with this new level of jitter, but one thing is for sure: If anyone can deliver a DAC with jitter in the femtosecond range and worthy of the 'Super' moniker, it has to be Calyx!

New Calyx USB cable will appear on CES2012.

What is so special? You can connect it to your iPad and can get the music thru Calyx Coffee. Watch out.

30-130, Venetian, LV, CES2012.

_________________
discovery hifi