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Post by tkaitkai on Sept 17, 2020 21:04:50 GMT -6
I was looking into clocking a few weeks ago and ultimately decided to forget about it... until tonight.
Recorded a whole bunch of vocals for a client, and upon listening back, realized they all sounded godawful. Tried changing the mic position, proximity, compression, gain settings — no luck. It dawned on me that I had forgotten to clock my Apollo/Lynx correctly. Switched to external clock in Console and instantly got the much clearer sound I'm used to. Re-recorded everything and had a big sigh of relief.
Now I'm curious again. A guy I've worked with has a 10M and swears by it. His raw recordings sound phenomenal, but $7K for a clock is currently out of the question. However, a Big Ben or a BLA Micro Clock doesn't seem too wild.
What's been your experience? Any improvements on the recording side of things?
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Post by prene1 on Sept 17, 2020 21:13:29 GMT -6
My friends have both the 10mx and the grimm cc's and swear by them.
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Post by Johnkenn on Sept 17, 2020 21:31:11 GMT -6
Why not the Dangerous Convert DA? Spectacular DA and it has its own clock.
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Post by svart on Sept 17, 2020 21:46:35 GMT -6
Coming from someone who designed their own converters and designs clocking solutions for RF that are 100x better jitter and phase noise than audio requires..
External clocks for audio are almost never worth the cost. The act of using interconnects, cables, buffering, phase locking, re-clocking through a DLL/PLL to reach usable sampling frequencies, etc., All conspire to reduce clock performance to levels below all but the worst internal clock.
Most modern designs use multi-MHz DPLL-based oscillators then divide the frequency down 256-512 times to reach converter oversampling frequencies, or further down to direct word sampling frequencies. This divides deterministic oscillator jitter by the same amounts, leading to internal system clock jitter to be extremely low, generally almost as low as to be considered negligible in general sampling work. Power supply and system noise on the I2S data bus are a greater issue since careful PCB layout is needed for optimal performance, but rarely understood by those who've only done audio work.
My converter clock was in the sub-picosecond jitter range, about 600 femptoseconds. To give a bit of comparison, ADAT standard required clocks with less than 1 nanosecond of jitter at 48KHz.. quite a large difference!
Anyway, the other side of the story is that a lot of people actually prefer a little jitter on the clock as it smoothes out harmonic content and softens harshness.
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Post by tkaitkai on Sept 17, 2020 22:01:33 GMT -6
Why not the Dangerous Convert DA? Spectacular DA and it has its own clock. No digital outs on my Apollo Twin, unfortunately. Which sucks, because I can't use the D/A on my Aurora. I should probably ditch the Apollo and get a USB card for the Aurora, but goddamnit, I love the Apollo's workflow. Anyway, the other side of the story is that a lot of people actually prefer a little jitter on the clock as it smoothes out harmonic content and softens harshness. Great info — thanks svart.
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Post by Quint on Sept 17, 2020 22:53:36 GMT -6
I was looking into clocking a few weeks ago and ultimately decided to forget about it... until tonight. Recorded a whole bunch of vocals for a client, and upon listening back, realized they all sounded godawful. Tried changing the mic position, proximity, compression, gain settings — no luck. It dawned on me that I had forgotten to clock my Apollo/Lynx correctly. Switched to external clock in Console and instantly got the much clearer sound I'm used to. Re-recorded everything and had a big sigh of relief. Now I'm curious again. A guy I've worked with has a 10M and swears by it. His raw recordings sound phenomenal, but $7K for a clock is currently out of the question. However, a Big Ben or a BLA Micro Clock doesn't seem too wild. What's been your experience? Any improvements on the recording side of things? Was it only vocals? Was there headphone bleed in the vocal mic? I'm just thinking out loud, but is it possible that slight drift, due to unsynced clocks on different sources, is resulting in phase anomalies, and a resultant detrimental effect on the sound? In other words, is it possible that things got "godawful" because of phase issues? As long as there are no phase issues due to clock related drift, I wouldn't think that internal vs external clocking would be so different that one scenario would be good and the other would be awful. I have experienced positive (and negative) benefits of external clocking in the past, but I wouldn't necessarily say that any of those situations took something from great to godawful, or vise versa.
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Post by johneppstein on Sept 17, 2020 23:25:28 GMT -6
Most knowlegeable people I know say that the clocking in a modern converter is generally good enough so that external clocks are obsolete. I haven't used my Lucid Gen X 192 since I got my Antelope Orion32.
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Post by tkaitkai on Sept 18, 2020 0:10:07 GMT -6
Was it only vocals? Was there headphone bleed in the vocal mic? I'm just thinking out loud, but is it possible that slight drift, due to unsynced clocks on different sources, is resulting in phase anomalies, and a resultant detrimental effect on the sound? In other words, is it possible that things got "godawful" because of phase issues? As long as there are no phase issues due to clock related drift, I wouldn't think that internal vs external clocking would be so different that one scenario would be good and the other would be awful. I have experienced positive (and negative) benefits of external clocking in the past, but I wouldn't necessarily say that any of those situations took something from great to godawful, or vise versa. Quint The term "godawful" is definitely an exaggeration on my part, hah! I guess the difference was just more apparent than I expected. No phase/headphone bleed issues... just an unpleasant midrange smear/bloat that cleared up as soon as I switched clock sources.
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 18, 2020 1:43:20 GMT -6
Coming from someone who designed their own converters and designs clocking solutions for RF that are 100x better jitter and phase noise than audio requires.. External clocks for audio are almost never worth the cost. The act of using interconnects, cables, buffering, phase locking, re-clocking through a DLL/PLL to reach usable sampling frequencies, etc., All conspire to reduce clock performance to levels below all but the worst internal clock. Most modern designs use multi-MHz DPLL-based oscillators then divide the frequency down 256-512 times to reach converter oversampling frequencies, or further down to direct word sampling frequencies. This divides deterministic oscillator jitter by the same amounts, leading to internal system clock jitter to be extremely low, generally almost as low as to be considered negligible in general sampling work. Power supply and system noise on the I2S data bus are a greater issue since careful PCB layout is needed for optimal performance, but rarely understood by those who've only done audio work. My converter clock was in the sub-picosecond jitter range, about 600 femptoseconds. To give a bit of comparison, ADAT standard required clocks with less than 1 nanosecond of jitter at 48KHz.. quite a large difference! Anyway, the other side of the story is that a lot of people actually prefer a little jitter on the clock as it smoothes out harmonic content and softens harshness. Nice post and I still regret that I jumped off your svart box converter. Never heard that jitter can smooth out things I just once heard between my RME and a cheapo by Behringer, that the B ate up most of the depth perception...
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Post by Ward on Sept 18, 2020 5:02:18 GMT -6
I was looking into clocking a few weeks ago and ultimately decided to forget about it... until tonight. Recorded a whole bunch of vocals for a client, and upon listening back, realized they all sounded godawful. Tried changing the mic position, proximity, compression, gain settings — no luck. It dawned on me that I had forgotten to clock my Apollo/Lynx correctly. Switched to external clock in Console and instantly got the much clearer sound I'm used to. Re-recorded everything and had a big sigh of relief. Now I'm curious again. A guy I've worked with has a 10M and swears by it. His raw recordings sound phenomenal, but $7K for a clock is currently out of the question. However, a Big Ben or a BLA Micro Clock doesn't seem too wild. What's been your experience? Any improvements on the recording side of things? I've been using the same old Digidesign 'Sync' clock for over a decade and it's absolutely perfect. I've thrown in other clocks and nothing works better, so yeah, don't waste big bucks when you can get something like a used Sync that does the same thing and does it just as well. I run this with the Avid HD i/o converters and they each have their internal clocks but the sync just 'sounds' better. JMHO and personal findings. YMMV, consult your dealer.
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Post by Ward on Sept 18, 2020 6:48:28 GMT -6
Nice post and I still regret that I jumped off your svart box converter. I regret I held off on jumping on the svart box converter deal! I'd like me something svart.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Sept 18, 2020 10:31:39 GMT -6
I’ll wager 99% of the actual “clock issues” out there are actually termination issues on large systems, or clock cable issues.
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Post by Tbone81 on Sept 18, 2020 11:01:01 GMT -6
I understand, as a laymen, that internal clocking is almost always inherently better. People much smarter than myself have explained it. But, I think clicking and converters in general need to be evaluated based on how they sound. Specs don’t tell the truth in any other piece of gear, comps, mic Pres, mics etc. why should clocking be any different?
When Antelope was still a new company, and only had 3 products, I was working as a gear pimp and hosted Several demos of the 10m. I’d go to peoples houses, personal studios and commercial studios and we’d shoot it out vs whatever they had. Based on all those comparisons I can say, imho, that the 10m is something special. It made everything 3-D. It was pretty dramatic.
I’d say you have to hear for yourself and judge whether the sound works for you and your style of mixing.
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Post by notneeson on Sept 18, 2020 11:19:34 GMT -6
I understand, as a laymen, that internal clicking is almost always inherently better. People much smarter than myself have explained it. But, I think clicking and converters in general need to be evaluated based on how they sound. Specs don’t tell the truth in any other piece of gear, comps, mic Pres, mics etc. why should clicking be any different? When Antelope was still a new company, and only had 3 products, I was working as a gear pimp and hosted Several demos of the 10m. I’d go to peoples houses, personal studios and commercial studios and we’d shoot it out vs whatever they had. Based on all those comparisons I can say, imho, that the 10m is something special. It made everything 3-D. It was pretty dramatic. I’d say you have to hear for yourself and judge whether the sound works for you and your style of mixing. In a way that would afford better translation or in a way that was more fun to listen to while working?
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Post by Tbone81 on Sept 18, 2020 12:15:39 GMT -6
I understand, as a laymen, that internal clicking is almost always inherently better. People much smarter than myself have explained it. But, I think clicking and converters in general need to be evaluated based on how they sound. Specs don’t tell the truth in any other piece of gear, comps, mic Pres, mics etc. why should clicking be any different? When Antelope was still a new company, and only had 3 products, I was working as a gear pimp and hosted Several demos of the 10m. I’d go to peoples houses, personal studios and commercial studios and we’d shoot it out vs whatever they had. Based on all those comparisons I can say, imho, that the 10m is something special. It made everything 3-D. It was pretty dramatic. I’d say you have to hear for yourself and judge whether the sound works for you and your style of mixing. In a way that would afford better translation or in a way that was more fun to listen to while working? Good question...I’d say it depends how you mix. If you’re mixing hybrid or analog I’d say it would definitely improve things as your get the benefit of that “3-d” sound baked into your tracks. If you’re purely in the box it may or may not suit you, it may makes things sound nicer than they are. It’s kind of similar to monitor choice. Some monitors are great because they’re revealing, other monitors are almost too good, as in they make everything sound good. Which one works for you is a personal choice. The 10m does both, it makes things much more revealing, but also makes them sound nicer. Hope that makes sense. Again, YMMV. Some guys get religious about converters...I’m not one of those guys.
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Post by svart on Sept 18, 2020 13:40:15 GMT -6
Nice post and I still regret that I jumped off your svart box converter. I regret I held off on jumping on the svart box converter deal! I'd like me something svart. A number of folks have lamented jumping off or not jumping on, but alas, there won't be any more new ones. Building each batch of 10 took me pre-ordering about 5K worth of parts, weeks/months worth of ordering, soldering, assembly, testing, shipping.. It was a great experience for me to have run it through to completion, and there's 30 happy customers out there with units, but man it was also grueling at the same time. Without a corporate support structure, there was no hope of doing larger production numbers it in any realistic fashion and it could have ended up like Ross M@rtin or any number of other companies completely overwhelmed to where they can't even keep up with emails let alone production issues, etc.
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Post by svart on Sept 18, 2020 13:49:54 GMT -6
I’ll wager 99% of the actual “clock issues” out there are actually termination issues on large systems, or clock cable issues. Years ago a guy I knew bought a Big Ben and all that because he was told he needed it for his setup, which was only a couple old avids. He swore up and down that it sounded better. I went to check it out and it sounded strange. I asked about the sound and he said it's much smoother sounding to his ears. I look at the back and he had a wordclock termination at every T even though the units also had terminations built in.. I removed the terminations and things sounded a lot better to me. He looked rather unhappy and questioned if I knew what I was doing. A few weeks later he called me up asking if I could help him on a mix that he was having trouble with. I went over and removed the terminations that he had put back. The mix instantly sounded much better. he bought me dinner and some beer.
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Post by svart on Sept 18, 2020 13:57:28 GMT -6
I was looking into clocking a few weeks ago and ultimately decided to forget about it... until tonight. Recorded a whole bunch of vocals for a client, and upon listening back, realized they all sounded godawful. Tried changing the mic position, proximity, compression, gain settings — no luck. It dawned on me that I had forgotten to clock my Apollo/Lynx correctly. Switched to external clock in Console and instantly got the much clearer sound I'm used to. Re-recorded everything and had a big sigh of relief. Now I'm curious again. A guy I've worked with has a 10M and swears by it. His raw recordings sound phenomenal, but $7K for a clock is currently out of the question. However, a Big Ben or a BLA Micro Clock doesn't seem too wild. What's been your experience? Any improvements on the recording side of things? I've been using the same old Digidesign 'Sync' clock for over a decade and it's absolutely perfect. I've thrown in other clocks and nothing works better, so yeah, don't waste big bucks when you can get something like a used Sync that does the same thing and does it just as well. I run this with the Avid HD i/o converters and they each have their internal clocks but the sync just 'sounds' better. JMHO and personal findings. YMMV, consult your dealer. Digi Sync clock is almost the same as the dead "Superclock" standard, which is 256fs (or 512fs for SC). In layman's terms Digi Sync is 256x the sample clock, or 12.288MHz for a 48KHz sample rate. This speaks to what I mentioned earlier, that typically the internally generated clocks are very high frequency and are divided down directly by the converter IC's. Using a very high frequency master clock is a great thing because that means each device can simply divide down the clock frequency to reach the target sampling rate, also dividing jitter. When using Wordclock, the clock frequencies are the same as the sampling clock and are either very jittery or must be upconverted to 256/512fs so that modern converter IC's can use them. Any jitter on the incoming word clock is multiplied in this case unless jitter "cleaning" also takes place which vastly increases cost and complexity and still might not result in anything nearly as good as a clean internal source.
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Post by roundbadge on Sept 18, 2020 14:15:40 GMT -6
I bailed the 10m trinity I bought from a friend for dirt cheap years ago.recommended by Michael Brauer.it kinda widened things but punched a whole down the middle image.particularly kick drums.like a weird phase thing I got sick of it.and got a Grimm CC1 multiclocking Burl,Dangerous and Avid interfaces. sounds great. the biggest difference without vs with is guitars and cymbals.smoother more liquid sound,less fizz. ..but doesn't fuck with the stereo image like the Antelope stuff did.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Sept 18, 2020 15:48:54 GMT -6
I bailed the 10m trinity I bought from a friend for dirt cheap years ago.recommended by Michael Brauer.it kinda widened things but punched a whole down the middle image.particularly kick drums.like a weird phase thing I got sick of it.and got a Grimm CC1 multiclocking Burl,Dangerous and Avid interfaces. sounds great. the biggest difference without vs with is guitars and cymbals.smoother more liquid sound,less fizz. ..but doesn't fuck with the stereo image like the Antelope stuff did. I think what RB proves is that like distortion we like certain types of jitter. There is nothing wrong with this concept, we just have to accept it.
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Post by Ward on Sept 19, 2020 10:12:02 GMT -6
I've been using the same old Digidesign 'Sync' clock for over a decade and it's absolutely perfect. I've thrown in other clocks and nothing works better, so yeah, don't waste big bucks when you can get something like a used Sync that does the same thing and does it just as well. I run this with the Avid HD i/o converters and they each have their internal clocks but the sync just 'sounds' better. JMHO and personal findings. YMMV, consult your dealer. Digi Sync clock is almost the same as the dead "Superclock" standard, which is 256fs (or 512fs for SC). In layman's terms Digi Sync is 256x the sample clock, or 12.288MHz for a 48KHz sample rate. This speaks to what I mentioned earlier, that typically the internally generated clocks are very high frequency and are divided down directly by the converter IC's. Using a very high frequency master clock is a great thing because that means each device can simply divide down the clock frequency to reach the target sampling rate, also dividing jitter. When using Wordclock, the clock frequencies are the same as the sampling clock and are either very jittery or must be upconverted to 256/512fs so that modern converter IC's can use them. Any jitter on the incoming word clock is multiplied in this case unless jitter "cleaning" also takes place which vastly increases cost and complexity and still might not result in anything nearly as good as a clean internal source. I bring mine up on screen at the start of each session, (Command-2 in Pro Tools) it's set to 'Word Clock' at 48K. So . . . don't know if it's doing what it says or not. Everything sounds pretty neutral to me. Could it be working correctly?
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Post by tkaitkai on Sept 19, 2020 15:21:24 GMT -6
I bailed the 10m trinity I bought from a friend for dirt cheap years ago.recommended by Michael Brauer.it kinda widened things but punched a whole down the middle image.particularly kick drums.like a weird phase thing I got sick of it.and got a Grimm CC1 multiclocking Burl,Dangerous and Avid interfaces. sounds great. the biggest difference without vs with is guitars and cymbals.smoother more liquid sound,less fizz. ..but doesn't fuck with the stereo image like the Antelope stuff did. I think what RB proves is that like distortion we like certain types of jitter. There is nothing wrong with this concept, we just have to accept it. This is kind of where my head's at on the subject currently. After sifting through endless info on the subject and doing several shootouts, I'm totally open to the possibility that I might prefer a little jitter. Obviously, the only way to find out is to get the $7000 Antelope.
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Post by Ward on Sept 20, 2020 5:40:32 GMT -6
I think what RB proves is that like distortion we like certain types of jitter. There is nothing wrong with this concept, we just have to accept it. This is kind of where my head's at on the subject currently. After sifting through endless info on the subject and doing several shootouts, I'm totally open to the possibility that I might prefer a little jitter. Obviously, the only way to find out is to get the $7000 Antelope. I take it you read the other Antelope thread and their Galaxy 64 i/o?
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Post by tkaitkai on Sept 20, 2020 8:12:52 GMT -6
This is kind of where my head's at on the subject currently. After sifting through endless info on the subject and doing several shootouts, I'm totally open to the possibility that I might prefer a little jitter. Obviously, the only way to find out is to get the $7000 Antelope. I take it you read the other Antelope thread and their Galaxy 64 i/o? Definitely. I've heard too many horror stories to ever delve into their interfaces/converters, but their clocks seem to be a different story. The 10M is still too rich for my blood, but a used OCX wouldn't be too unreasonable. Curiosity will probably get the best of me eventually.
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Post by johneppstein on Sept 20, 2020 14:16:53 GMT -6
I’ll wager 99% of the actual “clock issues” out there are actually termination issues on large systems, or clock cable issues. Yes. One thing I learned from video is that if you clock over cable all the cables MUST be the same length.
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