2. pc-audio
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Squeezing out extra perfomance: Reclockers

I am in the process of moving out of CD land and into a mac driven iTunes environment for all of my music (well, except for the vinyl:).

The setup I am using centers around a DEQX box. I like the DEQX because it just means less junk in the system - this thing has a VERY good DAC, preamp and the amazing active crossover/room correction ability. I figure it gets me about 90-95% of the way to what a dCS stack can do. Speakers are a homebrew that is pretty similar to the Emerald Physics CS-1 (no, not the 2. I am using 8 eminence drivers, but it was still inexpensive and pretty easy to build, and sounds INCREDIBLE with the DEQX). Files are going to be FLAC only, via xACT and Fluke, and Apple Lossless (at least until iTunes suppots FLAC natively, or somebody comes up with a better hack).

I have already decided I don't want to go the way of a Transporter, or a squeezebox, or a sonos. All are nice products, and have their thing going on, but I want to use a mac because I just dig the iTunes interface and at the end of the day, I want to control the head from my iPhone. Narrow minded, I know.

But Macs have a lot of jitter. They just are not precision audio devices. So the question is: how to reduce it?

It seems like in the reclocker market, there are the following options, priced from high to low:

Antelope Isochrone 10M - like $6k?
Esoteric...i forget the model, but its like 3K
Empirical Audio Pacecar - about $1200-1400 i think?
Apogee big ben - used around $1k

I'd be very interested in anyone's experience with any of the above reclockers/word clocks/masterclocks in the context of the Mac. Or, if you are aware of a product I should look at.

I really am open to suggestions, and, for sound quality, if I have to abandon the Mac as a front end I will, but it would be a bummer.
portypop
portypop OP
6 posts
 
Hey Kurt,

I'm interested too in why this works. I've been trying to find an intelligible(!) article on clocks and jitter reduction, but without a lot of success. There are a number of good articles out there that explain Jitter, but they don't go deeply into the cure. At least, not so a non-engineer non-math geek can understand it!

Audioengr, you seem to have a great grasp of this - I know you produce the Pace Car, which a lot of people like a lot. Are there really so many clocks involved? Could you please define them for us, and their different roles? It would certainly broaden my understanding of this jitter problem we area all looking to solve!
portypop OP
6 posts
 
According to Wikipedia, the Word Clock is not a device; it is a clock signal generated by the master clock device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_clock

In this context, it seems to me that the Antelope serves the role of the Master Clock, sending out a synchronization signal to all devices, aligning their time and thereby reducing jitter? Is this an accurate understanding of the functionality?
portypop OP
6 posts
 
Anybody want to pick this up and expand upon it? I'm really trying to learn here!
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