GIGO

Garbage in, garbage out.

It’s one of those acronyms that just feels right. Feed a system poor input, and you're going to get poor results. In computing, data processing, and even cooking, it’s a truth you can usually count on. But in audio? It turns out GIGO doesn’t always hold up—especially not in the case of one of my most significant digital breakthroughs: the Genesis Digital Lens.

The Lens came about during my time at Genesis Technologies, working with Arnie Nudell, the co-founder of Infinity. At that point in digital audio’s evolution, the idea of data being “bit perfect” had fooled a lot of people into thinking there wasn’t much room for improvement. What most didn’t realize was that digital audio coming off a CD transport—those strings of ones and zeros—was often so jitter-ridden and poorly timed that the DAC on the other end barely stood a chance at reassembling music into anything close to natural sound. The data itself wasn’t necessarily wrong, but its delivery was a mess: think of it like someone throwing you all the right puzzle pieces, just not in any order, and with missing corners due to poor timing.

That’s where the Digital Lens came in. I had envisioned a way to take that raw, jittered signal and completely reframe its presentation. Together with our chief engineer Bob Stadtherr, we designed a system that buffered the incoming digital data, stripped away its clocking garbage, and re-clocked it using a precision low-jitter master oscillator. The output? A pristine, properly timed replica of the original data stream, free from the sloppiness of the transport. We weren’t correcting the bits—we were reinventing their delivery. It was like a translator who not only understands the words, but says them to you calmly and clearly, instead of yelling them out of a moving car.

This approach turned the GIGO assumption on its head. With the Lens in place, even modest CD transports—units you’d never associate with high-end performance—suddenly sounded extraordinary. What mattered wasn’t just the source’s raw data, but how that data was handled and presented downstream. In fact, the core functionality of the Lens lives on in every digital audio product we make today, from our DACs to our transports. It taught me that in digital audio, garbage in doesn't have to mean garbage out—so long as you have the right tools in place.

It’s a lesson I’ve seen play out over and over again in high-end audio. Sometimes, what seems intuitively true turns out to be a shortcut that ignores nuance. Yes, you still want quality sources. But with digital, the path between source and playback is just as critical. Jitter, noise, timing errors—all of it matters, and all of it affects how natural or artificial the final result sounds.

For the listener, this changes everything. It means you don’t have to throw out your entire digital collection or abandon your aging CD player. With the right attention to timing and jitter reduction, even familiar recordings can come alive in ways you never expected. The soundstage opens up, transients snap into focus, vocals take on new realism. And suddenly, you’re not just playing music—you’re connecting to it.

So no, GIGO doesn’t always apply. At least not in my experience. Sometimes, with the right approach, you can take in a mess and deliver something truly beautiful.