I hear what you are saying, and I don’t know how bad jitter is on digitakt. I think the jitter I get is worse than sub-millisecond though. Like I mentioned before, my Elektron boxes are Machinedrum, Octatrack, and Digitone. Out of those, Machinedrum has the worst jitter. But, I love using it.
As for when samples begin, and phase coming from modulated delays. Even though I obsess about jitter, I’m not too analytical about phase. My issue with jitter is more just that it is so inconsistent. I love using modulated delays. I love using a lot of fast retriggers too, that shift sounds around. And, I do granular resampling all over the place. So, for me, phase isn’t so much my concern.
The jitter I get seems to be a bigger timespan than would just shift the phase.
My main concern is that I don’t want basses that are supposed to be aligned with a kick and a sidechain envelope to be constantly drifting early or late. If there is a drop, and the kick hits late, the bass will hit before the kick, messing up the transient, and of course, any sidechains will be off. To me, if there are sounds interfering with a clean kick transient, especially on important drops (like every 4/8 bars), it just messes up the impact, especially once a track is heavily limited in mastering. An trying to shift all the basses to a constantly drifting time seems more difficult than aligning the kick/snare.
I actually recently bought an E-RM Multiclock. It is an improvement, but unfortunately, I’m still getting jitter on my Machinedrum. I’m just recording parts from my octatrack right now, so I’m hoping it will show more improvement.
I’m very curious to see if midi 2.0 is going to help solve these issues.