Problem solved!

Yesterday we were Getting Tricky by not letting incoming audio jitter bother our mythical Magic DAC. To accomplish this unheard of feat we realized that if we didn't pay any attention to the incoming clock nor the incoming transitions of the musical bits, we wouldn't have any jitter, nor would we bother the power supply of our DAC. Remembering that jitter is the difference in timing between the data and its clock when it comes into our DAC, if we simply ignore the clock and figure out a way to also ignore the way a conventional DAC receives the data (edge triggering) we've managed to solve a classic problem that's plagued all digital audio equipment from day one. Interestingly enough this is the same problem Bob Stadtherr and I faced way back in 1995 when we designed the Digital Lens (a digital regenerator). We had originally envisioned solving this problem with what I affectionately dubbed the Symbolic Logic Receiver, or SLR. That idea was radically different than what anyone had been doing (and still is radically different). The SLR was "simple". Instead of registering receipt of a single bit when it transitioned from 0 to 1, we would take a series of quick snapshots of the incoming data. Look, look, look until we saw something changed, figure out with another couple of snapshots what it was (what kind of symbol it represented) and then add that new bit to a memory. In this way, we had no clock to worry about and no edge transitions either. Unfortunately technology at that point wasn't up to the task. Heck, in 1995 we had trouble getting even a small amount of RAM memory into the Lens. No, the idea was shelved and we did our best in other ways. But our story doesn't end there and we like happy endings. Let's imagine that several decades later another inventor would come up with a nearly identical idea on his own and implement it in a radical new receiver. And consequently solve the problem of jitter, how it affects the power supply and for the most part, reduces the differences we were so used to hearing in TOSLINK, USB, cables, and so forth. Everything we plugged into our mythical DAC sounded great, even with crap cables. Yup, our mythical DAC would be just remarkable in its purity, lack of jitter and immunity to the way data is sent. Aren't you glad you thought of how to make your Magic DAC get rid of jitter? You're very bright. You should be very excited.