Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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Original Message

RE: GPS audio master clock

Posted by Tony Lauck on July 25, 2012 at 06:23:53:
Except for a few (rare) broadcast applications there is absolutely no benefit to using a GPS clock or atomic clock for audio. There is no need for playback to take place at the exactly correct rate and pitch, as it wasn't recorded that way and a tolerance of 0.1% is more than adequate.

The devices are made for laboratory purposes and output 10 MHz. This requires using a frequency synthesizer (including a phase lock loop) to generate the clocks commonly needed for audio. This process will unavoidably add jitter compared to a local free running clock, and hence sound quality will be degraded through use of these clocks.

About the only exception might be streaming applications for continuous operation where low latency is required, such as broadcast audio of sports events. If the streaming source and the receivers were both locked to the same time base then it would be possible to avoid an occasional buffer glitch every few hours. In practice, there would still be glitches caused by Internet glitches, so this "improvement" might not even be noticed.