Audibility of Jitter
Reply #39 – 2010-05-24 18:15:19
John, the post that you quote refers specifically to RANDOM jitter. How can this possibly produce anything remotely resembling a 3 kHz tone? Thanks for the correction - I failed to note that their paper was confined to random jitter. The distortion caused by this random jitter should be much less audible than the distortion caused by siusoidal jitter. To reach audibility, the distortion caused by random jitter may need to be 20 to 30 dB higher than the distortion caused by sinusoidal jitter. The "random jitter" used in this experiment is frequency limited by the Nyquist theorem. Consequently, the jitter-induced distortion will have nearly the same spectral shape as the jitter. If the spectrum of the band-limited random jitter is white, we should expect the spectrum of the jitter-induced distortion to be nearly white. TPDF dither noise will be very effective at masking this spectrally-white jitter-induced distortion. If the jitter-induced distortion is the same amplitude as 16-bit TPDF dither noise, the system noise level will increase by 3 dB. If the jitter-induced distortion is 6 dB lower than the 16-bit TPDF noise, system noise will increase by 1 dB. In this experiment, the jitter-induced distortion is simply a white noise signal that gets added to the system noise. Note: Use RMS noise summing equations to calculate resulting noise. Digital audio transmission systems tend to generate jitter at very specific frequencies. The spectrum of the code-induced jitter at the end of a S/PIF cable is much closer to sinusoidal than random. Spectrally white random jitter is not likely to occur in the real world. Jitter composed one or two dominant sinusoidal frequencies is much more common. In my opinion it is more important to investigate the audibility thresholds for sinusoidal jitter. Obviously the investigation of random jitter is a good first step as it requires far fewer tests than an investigation of random jitter. With random jitter we have one variable - amplitude. An investigation of sinusoidal jitter would require two variables - amplitude and frequency. Many tests would be required to plot the audibility curves. We should be able to estimate the audibility of sinusoidal jitter-induced distortion using masking theory. Has anyone published these calculations? Are there any good papers on the audibility of sinsoidal jitter?