rysie wrote:Its time to get ill.

I know it may not be the coolest thing in the world around here...

But I fucking love the Beastie Boys!

I bet i love them more

Word.

Thanks Bob...

me and the Major seem to always have the same questions around the same time, and the Bob Weston done shot down a few of them questions right thurr.

And again, i stress, ass.

So, since I'm only using one device, (Delta 1010), should I even bother worrying about a word clock? Would an external clock improve my recordings at all?

I also plan on purchasing another Delta 1010. Is this the point at which I should look into an external clock?

MajorEverettMiller wrote:So, since I'm only using one device, (Delta 1010), should I even bother worrying about a word clock? Would an external clock improve my recordings at all?

I also plan on purchasing another Delta 1010. Is this the point at which I should look into an external clock?

In response to the first paragraph, yes. I'm guessing the M-Audio intgernal clock is of medium quality. Not awful by any means, but it could be improved. A high quality external clock will reduce jitter. you mileage may vary. If you know of someone with a device with a known good clock, see if you can borrow it for a day and do some A/B tests.

In response to the second paragraph, when using both devices you need to clock them together. This is as simple as running a BNC cable from the out of one to the in of the other and then setting your preferences for the hardware to have one behave as the master clock and the other to sync off the master. You could also run both of an external clock.

Where I work, it's not uncommon to have 6 digital devices running with one as the master clock and 5 timed off this clock.
(cranesong 8 channel mic pre/ A->D, 3 Mytek 8 channed A->D, and 2 Lynx AES cards... we do a lot of 24 track transfers)

Cheers!

Ben

Bob Weston wrote:The biggest audible changes that I can hear during digital recording are:

1. word length/bit depth - going from using 16-bit to using 24-bit is huge, the most noticeable difference to me

2. external clock - switching to a higher quality external word clock is the next most noticeable improvement

3. sampling rate - cranking up the sampling rate from 44/48 to 88/96 is the least noticeable to me.

When using an external clock and always using 24-bit, 44.1 or 48 sounds good to me. Going to 96 or 192 is nice, but takes up a lot of disk space and processing power.

enjoy,
Bob

This is an especially great bit of advice. From all the marketroid literature out there, it is tough to know where the greatest audible differences in these different digital technologies lie.

Thank you, Bob, for shedding some light on a complicated topic.

benadrian wrote:In response to the first paragraph, yes. I'm guessing the M-Audio intgernal clock is of medium quality. Not awful by any means, but it could be improved. A high quality external clock will reduce jitter. you mileage may vary. If you know of someone with a device with a known good clock, see if you can borrow it for a day and do some A/B tests.

My semi-educated guess is that while this is probably true, the difference is only marginal. I wouldn't spend $2000 for a master clock to clock a $500 multichannel soundcard. To me, something seems very out of whack with this concept. Or maybe the Beastie Boys would say, "That's whack". I dunno.

Another thing to think about: How many times have you sat down and listened to an album where you really admire the production quality, and thought to yourself:

"This sounds incredible...they must have used an amazing* master clock."






*Feel free to replace "amazing" with any image or slang of your choice. Whatever the "kids" are saying these days...

unarmedman wrote:

benadrian wrote:In response to the first paragraph, yes. I'm guessing the M-Audio intgernal clock is of medium quality. Not awful by any means, but it could be improved. A high quality external clock will reduce jitter. you mileage may vary. If you know of someone with a device with a known good clock, see if you can borrow it for a day and do some A/B tests.

My semi-educated guess is that while this is probably true, the difference is only marginal.

Adding an external clock will increase jitter in almost every circumstance over the use of an internal crystal clock.

Running your clock signal out of the clock generator through a cable driver, into a coax cable, into a receiver, then through a PLL and finally driving the converter will incur magnitudes more jitter than a crystal clock located as close as possible to the converter chips.

This is measurable and verifiable. Any "improvement" heard using an external clock is is probably "fool's gold" as it is likely a far more jittery signal. Sometime jitter manifests itself as sounding "different" and thus "better" to some. However, jitter is ultimately bad for your final product.

Most of what you hear about improvements from external clocking is marketing hype or parroted marketing hype by people justifying the addition of an expensive external clock.

However, if you need to clock several devices to the same clock source, a good external clock will be of great benefit.

http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index. ... 86e6f8c783

Chris

Chris,

Thanks for that link. Very interesting information.

I think I need to do some jitter measurements now.

Bob