Releasing a dirty stream to the D/A increases its processing load leading to distortion. This applies to all dacs but is particularly noxious when using upsampling. That‘s why reclocking the data before conversion has benefits. And by the way, excessive buffering leads to latency while underutilized buffers need empty packets fill-in, again increasing the processing requirement on the D/A converter. Be that as it may and as stated previously: in my setup the benefits of external master clocks is easily demonstrable
Importance of clocking
There is a lot of talk that external clocks because of the distance to the processor don‘t work. This is the opposite of my experience. While I had used an external Antelope rubidium clock,on my Etherregen and Zodiac Platinum Dac, I have now added a Lhy Audio UIP clocked by the same Antelope Clock to reclock the USB stream emanating from the InnuOS Zenith MkIII. The resultant increase in soundstage depth, attack an decay and overall transparency isn‘t subtle. While there seems to be lots of focus on cables, accurate clocking throughout the chain seems still deemed unnecessary. I don‘t understand InnuOS‘ selling separate reclockers for USB and Ethernet without synchronising Ethernet input, DAC conversion and USB output.
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No it doesn’t, latency has nothing to do with it and buffers are never “underutilized” because of back signaling. |
@antigrunge2 What processor? The only one that can affect timing of D/A converter is in the DAC. It loads samples from the buffer into D/A converter at even time intervals. It also signals back when buffer is too empty or too full. |
- 106 posts total