Using a seperate Word Clock

Be interested in your experience, best of luck.

If it uplifts your Bartok, I will be very surprised. But I stay open mind and will read your feedback with great interest.
I know that price is not all, but a 76 dollars clock on a 10k dac, I am skeptical.

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Do Signals have a suitable clock you could try out with the ER and the Plixir PS?

How are you going to connect this to your Bartok - I missed what external clock you ended up going for ?

Nope, its a level of nerdiness that they currently do not address😁 I of course include myself in the nerd comment😬

I already have the LiveClock unit. Only one at the moment and it’s set to 48KHz. I tried it on 44.1KHz, so used for 44.1KHz streams and, tbh, I couldn’t hear a change. I set it to 48KHz so I could test the Bartok on 96/192K streams and it gave a little extra clarity but I had to use headphones to detect the difference and on simpler music. As I thought, older recordings I couldn’t hear any difference and the little AE1 speakers didn’t help. I have a 192K sample download of Bach/Cello recently recorded ( Bach-Cello-Suites.wav ) and there is a definite increase in clarity and reduced noise… however it’s a headphones job to hear the difference. Fortunately with the Bartok you can shift from internal clock to external on the press of a button so it’s easy to do a back-to-back comparison.

I’ll be honest I seem to listen mostly to older band music at 44.1KHz so the clock isn’t really a must have upgrade. At £600 it’s okay but I couldn’t possibly justify a Rossini clock at 6.5K!!! My aged ears and the type of music I listen to simply wouldn’t justify it.

The 76 quid 10MHz GPS clock is just a play… again there is no way I could justify 5 or 6 grand on a Rubidium clock like the Antelope 10MX (though it does look sexy!).

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What is anyone hoping to achieve with such an external clock with audio? The benefit will be most likely in resolving long term ultra low frequency (say 0.001 Hz) drift… I really challenge anyone to hear the benefits of that…
I don’t want to appear rude, but it does all like like dabbling for dabbling’s sake, rather than audio related. I guess there is no harm in that… but perhaps Naim needs to create a tinkering room for such threads.

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Jitter…

But what jitter… ultra low frequency drift is jitter… but not audio related.
Phase distortion around the sample rate band and audio band are not going to be helped with an external GPS locked clock. There you need a local highly stable clock which is now economically achievable for domestic use using modern electronics.
All our audio replay clocks are asynchronous/relative, they don’t need to be synchronised to a global SMPTE.
If we were in broadcast television or radio with live external transmissions, then yes we would benefit from such clock synchronisation.
BTW GPS is accurate to 100nS increasing to upto 1mS… for audio clocks reliant on that for sample rate regular jitter, it would be very crude and offer poor to very poor performance.

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I read the stereophile article and there was a good explanation of how the jitter can create spurious noise spikes centered around the main note frequency. The example was with just ±1nS applied jitter. You had to get down to, if I remember correctly, 200pS of jitter before the spikes merged into the general background.

Yes, that is regular phase distortion around the sample rate clock. That is why DACs have precise clocks to minimise that phase distortion around the sample rate or reconstruction rate. Better DACs from the likes of Naim and others have very precisely controlled and stable clocks.
Stability is key for phase distortion rather than precision… an important distinction.

But that has little to do with external clocks or GPS synchronisation…

I’m confused… so a precise clock for your DAC is a good thing. Adding a superior external clock improves the timing of the internal DAC. I suppose the assumption is there are compromises with the internal DAC clock. Much like there are compromises with an internal PSU :wink: However the cost for an oven controlled precision clock module isn’t high so it makes you wonder why this isn’t a standard fitment. Back to power supplies I suppose; why not include a better power supply at the start?

Yes. And incomplete. Anything that delivers a clocked digital signal which includes more things that are not DACs than are.

Define superior. And remember these GPS devices are timecode delivery systems rather than pure reference oscillators. But let’s go back to the first point. Define Superior. Better than what? An oscillator on a circa 1995 DAC. A modern device with a carefully constructed clocking mechanism? Which would include a vast number of computerised components that support very high bandwidth and manage it their very capable internal clocks. Or do you mean less clock induced noise as opposed to accuracy? And again, compared to what?

I really think that depends on the implementation. I mean, if the efficient and reliable implementation of an internal clock isn’t your forte as a manufacturer and you have a legacy of good external master clock implementations, then comparatively, yes, there might be compromises there. For what it’s worth, Esoteric make more of a deal about clock noise than clock accuracy in their Japanese bumpf incorporating separate linear PSUs for each clock output and one for the master. So it’s conceivable accuracy isn’t the problem they are attempting to address. Either way, you’re better off asking the maker of such a device or the maker of a DAC that supports such a device what area they hope to gain from.

And there’s an endless discussion right there on several threads over the years. comparing PSUs to master clocks is a bit apples and oranges don’t you think. You really need to go back to the start of each decision and ask “what engineering problem are they attempting to solve with this?” It’s not always as simple as the external ones are better. There are benefits to having even the same level of PSU located externally. And problems too. Which is the engineer better equipped to deal with? Same with support for external master clocks. Is the oscillator really better? Does accuracy have anything to do with it? Are other problems being addressed?

Assumption really leads some threads astray. It’s absolutely okay to test these things and hear or not hear a positive difference. But speculating about the engineering behind some very complex design decisions doesn’t add a lot of value.

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tbh the cheapo GPS is a play… If I’m honest I don’t think it will improve the LiveClock and there’s a reasonable chance it will make things worse. :wink:

There are enough discussions on various forums including dcs that an external clock which is superior to the internal clock (caveat there) is a good thing. I’m saying superior as in one with less jitter. This seems to be the perceived thinking for dcs streamers anyway. As to whether adding an external (and superior - that word again) clock is beneficial for other makes/brands, I don’t know. Perhaps the design of DAC is relevant here.

However I 100% take on board what you’re saying :slight_smile:

Sorry confused by this thread … can you put an external clock on ER … to give a super accurate reconstruction???

Yes, they decided that to better their clock it would cost them over 500 dollars…which would price the ER too high. So they added a 10 MHz BNC clock input. You just turn the power off, move the clock switch to external clock setting, attach 10 MHz clock and power back up.

:+1:

As we have seen on here, today’s tinker can be tomorrow’s ‘must have’, ‘night and day’ upgrade! :crazy_face:

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So Gazza, why are you borrowing a Plixir PS with an additional rail for the ER?

Just wondering.

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