Maybe, at this point, someone could provide a laymen's explanation of "jitter". If I look at Wikipedia it speaks to several kinds of jitter and after several readings I confess to a migraine coming on. What I can glean is that jitter affects the spectral density, i.e., frequency content of a signal. I guess the fundamental question here is how does downloadable music using a high quality DAC(Bryston) compare to that from a CD player(Bryston). It's beginning to sound like CD has the advantage.
Unless the downloadable music is a least equal to a CD it would seem we have now undone what we have have spent $xx,xxx.xx on our systems to achieve. Many times I have music playing in the background but I don't use my Bryston set-up to do so. If I want background music I use one of my restored Marantz receivers which provide a very pleasant sound through my Paradigms, but it is not of a quality that I would accept for critical listening.
It may be, as someone noted, that a PC source has the potential to meet or exceed a CD source, with potential being the operative word. This implies that the equality does not exist at present. At this point it doesn't seem like spending several thousands of $$$'s to provide a sub CD standard of sound makes much sense. I guess the one up side here is that I could have access to a very large bank of music at a cost far less than what it would cost via CD's. The down side being it just doesn't sound as good.
So....how far off base am I on this whole thing....or am I?
