Do external word clocks make a difference?

[mervaka]

Personally I believe ifyour listening hard enough you can convince yourself of anything. If you want it to sound better, itwill.

 

Pretty much. Interesting point on PLL though.

 

On the subject of clocks, what's everyone's standpoint on oversampling?

[ross1c]

We went to this Seminar at SFL Group.

 

Really interesting - Yamaha have a great seminar planned.

 

I really wanted to hear a difference and while we where testing made myself think their was however no one got more than maybe 7 out of 10. If there was an obvious difference someone would have been able to get 10 right out of 15 or so people.

 

My conclusion is in that set up - no difference. Don't waste your money!

[jamesperrett]

 

On the subject of clocks, what's everyone's standpoint on oversampling?

 

I though it was pretty much universal for audio these days.

 

James.

[mervaka]

How do you mean, universal? I was after opinions after weighing up the pros and cons.

[mackerr]

How do you mean, universal? I was after opinions after weighing up the pros and cons.

 

What DA converter do you have that is NOT oversampled. I think that is what is meant by universal.

Mac

[jamesperrett]

How do you mean, universal? I was after opinions after weighing up the pros and cons.

 

What I was trying to say is that just about every audio convertor uses oversampling nowadays. Oversampling won the day something like 25 years ago.

 

Or are you thinking of something different?

 

Of course, there are still plenty of non-audio convertors that don't use oversampling.

 

James.

[Mark Payne]

Did noone but SFL attend this, or something? red faces all round indeed.

 

You had to be there. We were all there! Where were you ;-)

Sorry for the delay. I don't need to add anything.

 

We proved that the use of an external wordclock (a Big Ben in this case) only degrades the noise floor of the Yamaha consoles tested.

In stringent listening tests of around 20 people doing 10 way exercises (200 individual samples), we really, really, really could hear no difference. No-one statistically could identify the difference. We were all "wrong" as often as we were "right" in ABX testing.

 

We wanted to hear a difference because a free trip to Japan was on offer from Yamaha if we got better than 8 of 10 right.

 

I would like to officially put this myth to bed. Its (edit due to political correctness) wrong.

 

Regards

 

Mark

[Arran]

There's a good article on external clocking here in case anyone thinks it's just a Yamaha thing, there's also an excellent white paper by Dan Lavry of Lavry converters on the subject, that I've failed to find a link for.