Quote Originally Posted by Sealed
If we are talking about “source” jitter, you would be surprised at how much a bit of jitter will affect sound. Just updating the original cd clock in a Rotel RCD-855 (circa 1991) to a new clock made a big difference. The old clock was something to the effect of low-millisecond jitter, much like the threshold stated in that test. The new clock was well into the nanosecond area, and specified a noise floor -135db +/- (vs -112db for the old clock) in reality, we are talking a very short rise time difference--but it was really obvious sounding.

As to “jitter” or smear, some fancy cables (or poorly built ones) can smear a signal on a time basis. I encountered this with RS gold cables. Not all of the RS cables are like this, but I had a batch from a poor run. The soldering was from the “bigger the blob the better the job” school, and QC missed these.

Even compared to a set of properly built RS golds, there was a big difference in audible effects. The poorly done batch sounded veiled and closed in. The properly built batch were much cleaner.

MIT has cables with components in line. These components do have a time-smear effect almost like a cheap crossover. Some exotic cables use exotic designs, and various insulation and conductive materials. Van Den Hul uses carbon fibre, which is a poor conductor and equates to adding a resistor inline with a component.

Plain AWG 12 oxygen free copper, with unterminated ends (direct wire connect of a short run) has a very low resistance, and very little chance of time-based smear.
Of course you establisged all these testable claims through bias controlled listening? And, has been so duplicated by others? No? Sorry, just more wishfull speculations.