Jitterbugging

I had mentioned weeks ago that after a brief listen, the Audioquest Jitterbug seemed to have good potential, though I had never heard it in Music Room One. At RMAF I had a chance to actually play with it on our system and can now report to you it does what it is advertised to do. My first encounter with this little USB stick came from Vegas at last years CES. Steve Silberman wrangled me into the Audioquest room and demonstrated the Jitterbug on a pair of headphones. Indeed, it worked as he had said; better clarity, bass and definition. But how much can you tell standing at a tradeshow with headphones you are not familiar with? For me, not so much, and so I remained underwhelmed until I actually got my hands on one. Last week's RMAF found us in quite a nice room with the YG Acoustics Sonja 1.3 loudspeakers driven by an all BHK system and sourced with DirectStream, playing music from my tricked-out Mac Mini. Pictures of the room can be found here (thanks to Scott Hull from Part-time Audiophile for pictures, and Terri McGowan for room setup). On day two the system had loosened up and sounded quite good, certainly revealing. I placed the Jitterbug in series with the JCAT USB cable and improvements were immediate and obvious: increased spatial information, tighter, fuller bass, lower noise and obviously lowered jitter. A keeper. Tomorrow, another surprise from the show.