As admitted audiophiles, we’re trained to obsess over timing.
We spend real money on reclockers, atomic clocks, femto clocks—clocks so precise they’d make NASA jealous. Some of these devices are accurate to billionths of a second. We’re told this precision is critical, that without it, the music falls apart.
Where and when does timing actually matter?
The answer isn’t as sweeping as some make it out to be. Timing doesn’t matter everywhere. Long-term accuracy in a clock—being dead-on over hours or days—is largely irrelevant to sound quality. After all, our ears don’t notice if the song ends a nanosecond early. What matters is short-term stability—whether the timing of each individual sample being sent to the DAC is consistent. If those samples arrive with even tiny fluctuations in spacing—what we call jitter—that’s when sound gets smeared.
That only happens at one critical point—when the digital signal is converted to analog.
The DAC is where timing goes from theoretical to audible. It’s the border between the digital domain, where timing doesn’t exist in any meaningful way, and the analog domain, where voltage and time shape the sound we hear. Up until that handoff, data is just data (as we discussed yesterday). Whether it arrives early or late, it’s meaningless without a clock to interpret it.
If your DAC is being fed by a clean, low-jitter source, the results are natural, open, and spatially coherent. If not, the image collapses, transients soften, and the whole performance feels less alive. It’s subtle, but unmistakable.
At PS Audio, we’ve spent years isolating this problem. In products like the PMG Signature DAC and transport—and the AirLens streamer—we designed the final clocking stage with extreme care. That’s because everything depends on that last moment—the instant a bit becomes voltage.
So yes, timing matters. Just not everywhere.
Not across the network.
Not in your file format.
Not in long-term accuracy.
It matters only where digital becomes analog, and only in that narrow window where the music is born. That’s where you want your precision.
That’s where you hear the difference.
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