Our story wraps up

Today memory is cheap. Back in the 1990's it was expensive. The Digital Lens we were designing back then had a whopping half a megabyte of memory. That memory required two large IC's to house it. For comparison, today's version of the Digital Lens, which we place into our Transport, is 250 mB, 500 times greater than the original. Half a megabyte was just enough to handle all the data a standard CD player could give us and allow enough space to rebuild the data and reclock it out of the memory with no jitter. But there was a problem. It is the same problem faced by every digital audio designer today, the power supply. The digital audio data coming out of the CD player was jittered. This means that the precise bits of musical data weren't so precise and were varying back and forth in time. Every pulse of data that comes into a product affects the power supply of that product. In other words, the jitter we wanted to eliminate had gotten into the device and polluted the power supply with jitter. That pollution would contaminate the perfect output we worked so hard to achieve. So despite our best efforts at eliminating jitter, we were reintroducing it back into the output. Bummer. But we had a plan. We would use two power supplies: one for the input and memory, the other for a separate output and clock, and we would place both on separate PC boards and connect them with light. Yup, remember our discussion on TOSLINK? If we used something similar and optically connected the input board to the output board we could effectively decouple the two so the jitter pollution would not enter into our digital audio stream. It worked. It was not perfect. But it worked. We sold several thousand Genesis Digital Lenses and even after all this time, it's hard to find a Digital Lens on the used market, so effective they were. Now you know the story and the design challenges we faced bringing the world's first RAM buffered jitter reduction product to the world of high-end audio.