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How can I tell if I need a better clock for my DAC?

I was interested in the responses to a related post by leemaze this week, saying that a Synchro Mesh was a good way to improve a DAC with subpar jitter.  I have a Cambridge CXU, with an inboard DAC; how could I determine how much jitter it has? 
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jaybe
753 posts
 
Clocking before the DAC can make a huge difference. Not speaking on theory, but experience, which matches many other’s experience as well. Too many voice their opinions, often based on theory, or just a false or incomplete understanding of how things really work, without actual experience. I’m not an expert, but know what I hear. I already have a good DAC, but added an ISO Regen and SOtM clocking device and it made a significant improvement to the sound. (And linear power supplies to the ISO ansd SOtM which brought it up yet another level.) More weight, more body, resolution, improved timbre, more "analog" (though I dislike that term). Of course you also need a downstream system capable of revealing these improvements. Many or most DACs will benefit from these devices, incuding super high-end ones. I’ve heard a few situations where there was not consistent improvement among users, such as PS Audio and Exasound DACs and maybe a few others. Likely all DACs under $2-3000 will benefit and many more over this amount. I’m not really interested in those who say why not buy a better DAC to begin with, or "USB is flawed, why bother", or especially "expectation bias" (that’s BS). Hey it’s my money and I’m having fun. If things don’t work, I sell them, but that’s not the case for these devices.
Plenty more info on this topic on the Computer Audiophile forums where users share their actual experiences and what devices brought about (or didn’t, as some work better than others) these improvements.
czarivey
5,946 posts
 
a clock for your what??
lowrider57's avatar
lowrider57
5,417 posts
 
Clocking before the DAC can make a huge difference.

Agree. I use a PS Audio PWT transport which, as many of you know, reads the CD and loads it into a buffer. It then clocks the data and sends out a timed bitstream to an external DAC.
This is why a good cable is needed to preserve the reduced jitter signal.



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shadorne
7,477 posts
 
Interface jitter is a fact of life. It doesn’t matter what you do. The only complete solution to interface jitter is to select a DAC device that ignores the incoming clock and uses it own internal asynchronous clock. Note that this will still leave you with the intrinsic jitter of the device itself but at least you won’t have to worry about fancy cables or what length to use.

Alternatively, reclockers and a random selection of cables might help reduce interface jitter if you want to stick with a DAC that does a poor job of eliminating incoming jitter itself...kind of a dogs breakfast of a solution as you can never totally get rid of interface jitter and you would not even know if you had.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 

What you can do at home is listen.  If you hear a good track on another friends system that has superb focus, clarity and liveness and your system makes the vocalist 2 feet wide and the guitar 1 foot wide, then you have jitter.  If you hear echoes or "fill" between instruments in your system and not in your friends system, you have jitter.

There are standard jitter tests that display the spectrum of the jitter on the D/A output given a standard input signal from a disk.  If you were an engineer with the right equipment you could perform these measurements.

The problem is that even if you could, the results are not well correlated to listening tests.  I mean really bad jitter in the measurements is audible, but more subtle jitter can be just as audible and will not show up in the measurements.  This is the problem with the state of our measurement technology today.  May improve in the future though.

What you can do at home to improve jitter from your transport is:

1) treat the disks with Ultrabit platinum

2) spray-coat the top side on the disk with a rubber coating to reduce vibration - get this at Home Depot or Michaels etc.. Mask it properly with thin card stock.

3) re-write the disk on CDROM using DBpoweramp on PC or XLD on Mac - this improves the pit shape over the commercial disk

4) pay a modder to install a new clock and clock voltage regulator/power supply

#4 will make the biggest improvement in a CDP, but you will still benefit from 1-3 even with the modded clock.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio

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