Can Digital beat our Analog installations?

Czarivey,

To lock the DAC to a word clock signal, it is necessary to synchronise the DAC's internal clock with a Phase-Locked Loop. You cannot do that directly from (for example) an SPDIF cable carrying digital audio. Therefore you are using separate wordclocking cables going from the sources (CD, DAT, Upsampler, Laptop etc.) to the Dac or to a Master Clock (here including the Dac as source - in slaving mode).

Wordclock is "something digital" -SPDIF see under Wikipedia

Thanks Jf, That's what I thought of some kind of synonym to our ordinary digital cable "wordclocking".

Czarivey,

maybe this is also helpful:

Word clock is used inside electronic equipment as part of an I2S interface, which conveys PCM digital data in serial format between chips (e.g. FPGA chip to DSP chip). I2S consists of 3 connections:
- serial data (both channels multiplexed together)
- bit clock (used to clock each bit into the receiver)
- word clock

A word clock signal is a square wave with very fast edges and the same frequency as the (PCM) sample rate. Word clock carries no digital data, it used to set the timing of the digital words and select L/R channels.

Word clock has also been used for decades to synchronise different pieces of electronic equipment (e.g. a digital multi-track recording system). The source data MUST be locked to the master clock generating the word clock data. You can use any good-quality 75 ohm BNC coax SPDIF cable for word clock, provided it is DC coupled. Some SPDIF cables have a coupling capacitor in series with the signal wire - these cannot be used for word clock as the capacitor blocks the DC offset.

Jfrech,
I am pretty sure using a Vivaldi Dac in your chain is an improvement. maybe this will be my next step too. You then have two Dual AES inputs - this is absolutely perfect!