maarvold wrote on Fri, 13 October 2006 17:12 |
Dan, I have a composer friend who is (in my opinion) needlessly suffering as he tries to sort out all the opinions and information about convertors and clocking. I wrote this condensed version. Would you please correct, or augment, anything that needs it? Thank you. 1. Any reasonably well-designed internal clock will provide higher integrity (lower jitter) clocking than any external clock. Period. End of book. 2. When using multiple digital devices they must all be clocked from the same master clock source to work together without pops, clicks and other anomalies in the digital domain. 3. Clock integrity comes into play at the A-to-D conversion--where data and resolution can be lost (and never recovered)--and at the D-to-A conversion--where it can change the sonic character and resolution of the playback (can you say "wide and deep soundstage"?). 4. When data is moving between devices in the digital domain, clock integrity does not matter nearly as much AS LONG AS ALL DEVICES ARE PROPERLY RESOLVING TO THE SAME MASTER CLOCK AND CABLED/TERMINATED PROPERLY. 5. In a 'perfect world' one should record slaved to the [reasonably well-designed] internal clock of the A-to-D and play back slaved to the [reasonably well-designed] internal clock of the D-to-A. 6. For many people creating and living in a 'perfect world' is too much of a pain in the ass. Enter: the high quality external clock. The advantage is that you set everything up one time (cabling, termination, master clock source on each device), everything is happy, you never have to think about clock ever again and it sounds good (although not quite as good as if you follow #5). You can also have people bring over other digital devices (DA-88 or a laptop/GigaStudio/Hammerfall card, for example), resolve them to your clock and transfer digital data back and forth perfectly all day long without worrying. |