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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.

antigrunge2
antigrunge2 OP
1,404 posts
 

A good clock is between $5k-15k. What Dacs are you talking about?

greg_f
100 posts
 

DCS, Weiss, Meitner to name a few. But you are missing the point, the external clock is much further away from the DAC IC (assuming an integrated type) than the one inside the DAC unit. You have the extra cable to feed the external clock to the DAC unit, the length of the cable, the impedance, exact termination need to be taken into consideration. In the case of a square wave clock output, as I said before, the edges are extremely fast and need to be contolled.

antigrunge2 OP
1,404 posts
 

DCS is offering an external clock for their top of the line stack as well

greg_f
100 posts
 

Sure they do, they offer more options to the end user, you take your choice.

erik_squires
16,056 posts
 

A recording studio is using an external clock as much for synchronization as for anything else, as they often have a situation when devices are daisy-chained together and must work together correctly at every clock beat.  The multiple pieces of equipment can't "hear" each other the way an orchestra does, so the master clock is there to make sure all the different pieces are in synch.

It's the daisy chaining effect that CAUSES jitter unless mitigated by the master clock.

On the other hand, with Internet streaming, there's no such synchronization. 

PS- Error correction is taken care of by the TCP portion of TCP/IP and handles requests for retransmission when packets are corrupted.  Another reason for big buffers, having enough time to ask for a retransmission when an error occurs.

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