Rip CD to Mac - basic question

Are there any specs/measurements that indicate the superiority of the clock compared to standard Squeezebox Touch?

Or perhaps more simply, why did you choose to use the clock you did rather than the one SB Touch uses? What makes it "better"?

The price is certainly reasonable as best I can tell (sure beats DCS) and it appears to be a well thought out device to help optimize performance based on your website description. I would expect only positive results with most sources.

The clock I use was chosen for its jitter spectrum and pricing. I also offer better clocks in my other products, but not at this pricepoint.

All of my clocks are custom builds, not off-the-shelf.

The clock in most high-volume low cost products is usually off-the-shelf and nothing special. These monolithic oscillators usually cost in the $2-3 range if that much.

It is possible to get slightly better clocks, using oven-controlled technology
to stabilize the oscilltor even more, but these have costs in the $200+ and that is my cost, and I have to purchase the in hundreds, so the risk is $20-40K for me.

The other thing to understand is that no matter how good the oscillator spectrum of jitter looks, the designer will never actually achieve this, only come close. In order to come close, the design must have extremely good power subsystem and voltage regulation. These are all custom discrete designs in my products. Again, off-the-shelf chips are simply not good enough to achieve really low jitter, even from the best oscillators.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

So much advice in error...

To correct AIFF IS LOSSLESS. Apple uses the lossless version a unique to Apple OS. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Interchange_File_Format

Really guys, please think before you speak, it sends folk asking for advice down a blind ally....

AIFF is unencoded, not lossless. it differs from .wav in that it has different header and instead of the words coming left-right word, they come right-left word.

ALAC and FLAC are lossless encoded.

They all suck for sound quality IME, even AIFF. I only use .wav

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I think the word you are looking for is lossless compression.

I do find a slight difference between AIFF and WAV but both IMHO are better than FLAC/ALAC.

ps AIFF has the option of having big or little endian so it can be in the same order as WAV. Both WAV and AIFF are derived from the Amiga IFF standard.