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In Reply to: " It can be configured to sync to the incoming signal " posted by beppe61 on June 18, 2014 at 01:29:33:
Sound quality will be determined by the quality of the clock signal at the exact point where digital gets converted to analog (generally inside a DAC chip). This quality will depend on the quality of the clock itself, the clock circuitry and the transmission circuitry that gets the clock signal to the conversion point, as well as any power supplies and power wiring involved. If there is a very good clock that happens to be located right next to the conversion point then it probably won't be possible to beat this even using an excellent clock and excellent quality cabling and circuitry to the DAC. If the clock in the DAC is poor then it is likely there will be an improvement using an external clock.
To some extent the situation depends on the type of DAC. If it is an R2R ladder DAC the clock used at the conversion point is already a word clock. With a delta-sigma converter (most DACs today) the conversion runs at a very high multiple of the sample rate, e.g. 40+ MHz in case of a SABRE DAC and this is called a master clock. If the system runs off a local master clock then jitter will be low. It will be possible to divide down this high clock frequency and output a word clock without adding much jitter by using a simple counter. Unfortunately, going in the opposite direction is not so simple and will involve using a phase lock loop or some other means to synchronize a fast local clock to the input clock. In this case it is quite likely that using this mechanism will degrade sound.
If one runs an SPDIF transport the clock is multiplexed on the digital cable to the DAC. Due to bandwidth limitations of the cabling, reflections, etc., this adds unavoidable jitter on the input signal. In this case if the transport provides a second clock signal on a dedicated line some DACs will be able to use this signal to synchronize their internal master clock and this will probably result in less jitter.
These are all second and third order effects. What you hear will depend on the specific equipment used. In some cases with some recordings you may even like the sound of objectively worse (jittered) audio if it complements defects in your system or otherwise suits your taste. Theory takes second place to practice, so YMMV.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: " It can be configured to sync to the incoming signal " - Tony Lauck 06/18/1407:14:17 06/18/14 (1)
- RE: " It can be configured to sync to the incoming signal " - beppe61 12:17:36 06/18/14 (0)
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