Can someone please explain JITTER in Layman's terms?

[Gog]

Been hearing about this more and more often lately... When burning audio cd's this is a factor if you burn at high speeds (above 4x) and you risk having lower quality audio copies, but I have a few questions.

What exactly is it?
If you burn an audio cd that was affected by Jitter, would the digital audio extraction suffer from jitter as well and be of sub-par quality when compared with the original cd?
What speeds should audio cds be burned at?

Thanks in advance🙂

 

[cmdrdredd]

*shrugs* I copy a CD and burn at 40x and never hear a difference and I'm an amateur musician and notice musical flaws quite regularly.

I dunno...experiment. My experience shows that better burners can burn cheap disks at 40x as well as a cheap burner can burn good disks at 1x.

 

[Gunbuster]

Jitter is something that happens when rich snobs need to justify $3000 oxygen free depleted uranium neodymium shielded cables, $15,000 speakers, and $8,000 external DACs

 

[Gog]

Neither of you guys gave a really informed responce there...

Its common sense that if you burn audio cds at a higher speed you risk introducing more errors into it. When I burn cds in nero, the burnproof feature is enabled linearly with increases in speed.

Also your ability to detect lower quality recordings depends on what audio system you are playing the cd from....

 

[Mavrick007]

Your best bet is to burn audio cds at a slower speed than regular data cds so that you can eliminate jitter.
I would describe it from poorer quality cdrs, maybe the burn process creates jumps or jitter when it burns at high speeds.
To help eliminate a pop, crack or hiss in recordings, you burn slower speeds for audio. It could be compared to taping a vhs tape at SP or EP, the video/audio quality is poorer at EP but you get more per tape. My friend makes his audio cds at very slow speeds, usually 1x or 2x and doesn't have any qualms but some people couldn't be bothered waiting that long.

I would say personally, burn your audio cds on very good quality media (Fugi, Ty, Kodak Gold, etc), and reduce your speed while burning. That way it will have a chance of working in most players, last longer, and probably sound the best that it can.

 

[Goi]

Jitter is something that happens when rich snobs need to justify $3000 oxygen free depleted uranium neodymium shielded cables, $15,000 speakers, and $8,000 external DACs

And you can't tell the difference between 200FPS and 30FPS, 32bit color from 16bit color, 4XFSAA from no AA...these are just things that happens when rich snobs need to justify $1000 on 6 gajillionhertz, 23 bajillion transistor graphics cards with silver plated, CNC machined 9000 finned heatsinks with 20000RPM fans melded onto them.

Jitter is real, but its impact varies. Some people pick it up right away. Others who think 128kbps mp3's are "CD quality", or that even "CD quality" is the holy grail, often don't. Below are some links that might be informative.

What is Jitter?
How does jitter sound?
How can we get rid of jitter?

 

[Codewiz]

Ok here is the deal......

If you burn an audio cd at 40x. Check it with Scandisc in Nero CD speed for c1 and c2 errors while doing a surface scan and if there are no errors then you are fine. The problem comes into play is that most of the time on cheap media and fast burns you get bad spots on the cd. Scandisc will show this. Does it make the cd unreadable? No. Can it hurt the quality? Yes. They are errors and the problem is that music cds do not have any extra error correction than what is in the hardware. Data cds have extra bits for error correction. That is why a audio cd can hold more information than a data cd.

So in other words YMMV. If you have a good burner and good media and you don't have c1 and c2 errors in scandisc with fast burns then keep burning at that speed. If you do then you need lower the burn speed.