That's where Srajan bows out and we in. When we took the original bait but still lay in wait for the reclocker's arrival, we dug back into PS Audio's Ted Smith talking about his design of their DSD DAC which we would combine with the reclocker. At ca. 16'03 minutes into this video, Ted explains how his design identifies incoming signal without any clock. The circuitry instead samples it very fast and looks at the outcome as a pattern, with zero attention paid to the incoming clock. There's no PLL involved and the signal's clock is discarded. To us, this predicted that the combination of S922 sdr and PS Audio DirectStream converter would make no difference. While still in the waiting room for the Portuguese packet to hit our bio clocks, our digital guru Bruno Putzeys of Hypex/Mola Mola paid a visit. When we discussed the potential benefits—or not—of a pre-reclocker, Bruno just said "garbage in is garbage out" in true wise man's fashion. To us this meant that the Qualia physic might work. Now, our subjective human experience, every tiny chunk of sensory input of it, is a qualia, the Latin word from which derives quality. We'll use the same term here both singular and plural. Our five senses process our raw data input into a living reality via sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.


These are the qualia which create our world here and now, from moment to moment. The lush redness of a rose is a qualia as is its luxurious scent. The smoothness of silk and the roughness of beach sand are qualia. The reason that qualia are so important isn't just our five senses. The only reality we can possibly ever know is a complex construct of the various qualia which our brain interprets. There is no way to perceive or know reality outside our own qualia. Qualia are units of perception and reality is a perceptual collage. If it is anything else, we shall never know it. Even our inner world consists of qualia by way of thoughts, feelings, imaginary images and related sensations. As far as our visual cortex is concerned, there's no difference between seeing a red rose or imagining it. The qualia of red is present in both. Deepak Chopra goes further into the related Science of Consciousness in various articles of which this one provides a nice overview.


When the package arrived in two boxes, one for the reclocker and one for its power supply, we could not wait to hook things up. Aside from the PS Audio DirectStream DAC, the Benelux distributor for PS Audio had also sent us a NuWave DSD DAC. This is a simpler version of the DirectStream and uses a conventional chip instead of handling all signal processing via FPGA. With our Devialet Premier added to the list, we had three DACs to start our experiments, which is, go on the war path against jitter. Out with the red paint! What are the playback jitters and where do they come from? Playback jitter is the inaccuracy in the timing of the clock's "tick tocks" which transfers samples of digital data into the D/A converter. To move digital data from one point to another, it must generally be clocked. In order for D/A conversion to work, a digital word must be presented to it at a fixed frequency. That's the job of the system clock or clocks. If some data transfers a fraction of a second too early and others a fraction too late, we call that jitter. For wrist watches, that would be no problem. The 'off' fractions would be so tiny, they'd average out nicely over a minute or so.

In a digital system, jitter can arise at various junctions. Let's start with the master clock as the reference for any clock-related activities within the system. If this clock is not accurate enough, expect jitter. After-market higher precision clocks can help; or use a better "femto" clock to begin with. With analog digital media i.e. spinning discs, the accuracy of the spin-rate is another entry point for jitter. Many tricks like a memory buffer loaded by the spinning media, then read out with a precision clock combat this form of jitter. Spinning media do not contain zeros and ones as many still imagine but a mix of pits and lands of various lengths. Each transition from land to pit and vice versa indicates a digital 1. Misinterpretation of such timing transitions injects jitter. This is why in many cases, the crisper edges of a digital copy's pits and lands made from a commercial CD onto CDR can sound better. Once signal is read which could also be from a hard disk, it must be sent to a DAC. Often this happens via S/PDF, a single-cable series protocol which includes the clock. Hence at the receiving end of the digital cable, the clock must be extracted/recovered from the signal. Voilà, another opportunity to get all jittery.