I used to design digital electronics in a past life. When the slave has locked onto the master clock, and remains there locked for a long time, it's game over.

I used to design digital electronics in a past life. When the slave has locked onto the master clock, and remains there locked for a long time, it's game over. The slave becomes effectively a clamp-down filter on the master's real or imaginary deficiencies. Yes, the master does matter still, but a quality, stable slave acts as a damper. The slave's own jitter tendencies might be important - but then again, where do they end up? Mostly in the analog /dev/null sinkhole - the sampling frequency is far above the audio spectrum, the jitter components are too, mostly (unless it's low-freq drift), and the output of your DAC has a steep downpass filter. Jitter components are obliterated. That's assuming that jitter would matter at all even if it was not filtered out. But if a DAC is flickering that badly that you could hear it, it's probably a piece of trash anyway. Make sure the actual digital-to-analog conversion (the last link in the digital chain) is done well, and don't worry about anything else. Yes, you can screw up DAC design and execution, but nowadays most DACs are very good. This is not your grandpa's radio.