Clocking question

What irks me is I'm always up for a random funny post or gear post but myself, svart or Dan's posts which have some real experience or insights into actually how all of this this works is generally left high and dry. No post likes to be seen, I'm not expecting anyone to have Svart's sort of knowledge but how are people supposed to be AE's if you can't at least process a different technical point of view amongst or against "ears are king" (which are easily fooled) crap?

Manufacturers create this stuff for you. Do you beleive it's all ignorance? Don't get me wrong, the differing opinions even on a scientific level, lapses in knowlege etc. all has its part to play. I've learned stuff from Chris (aka Svart) despite doing this for decades and I've met some tool sheds of engineers in my time. Before anyone gets annoyed I ain't saying you need to be a technical expert to be a mixing or mastering "engineer" however if you can't marry the technical with sound to a certain extent then god help you..

I mean it’s clocking and dithering man. This stuff was a black art until a few years ago. The way many current very high end converters work renders what John is doing irrelevant because they ignore all external clocks and jitter and even sample rate as long as they get the samples but many of the older PLL type great converters sound just as good as those or just different but can be defeated from an external clock and there’s otherwise gear that is pretty good that just has clocking issues over aes like the older dangerous converters prior to convert 2, 8, and ad+. I’ve also heard the Lynx hilo change sound radically based on how you configure the clocking.

I was just poking fun at "if you can't marry the technical with sound to a certain extent then god help you.." with a pic of Rick Rubin sleeping on the couch during a session 😁 

To the larger discussion though...I don't think you can say what John is experimenting with here is irrelevant because anytime something sounds different and potentially better in your studio then that's a worthwhile pursuit.  I've worked in many situations over the years with mixed brand converters, Lynx, Avid, Apogee, Antelope, etc.. one being the master, all running off of their internal clocks or with a separate master clock.  It was always worth trying a few clocking situations to see if you liked the results and to ensure you had a stable/smooth running rig.  I never cared if the most expensive one was the master clock, the cheapest one or what.  So, you'll have to excuse some of us that have experimented with this for years if you say technically there can't be a difference or it can't be better.  Of course we all have preferences and we could listen to a few examples and debate which one we think sounds best but to chalk up the differences to confirmation bias is kind of insulting to the dude sitting there knowing these things don't sound the same. 

So yes, I value what my ears tell me over any forum post, white paper, YouTube video, etc.. So, the only point I'm trying to make is that if you try something and like it, then keep doing it.  Who cares if it technically isn't "right?"  In addition to that, if experimenting with clocking gives different and in some situations preferable sonics then instead of trying to prove why that can't be, how about go back to the drawing board and try and figure out why real life isn't matching up with what is "supposed" to be happening?  

BLIND TEST: If anyone is interested, here is the same mix with a few different clocking situations to see if you hear an appreciable difference:
www.dropbox.com/sh/okb16qhat60h6ab/AAA1_UquTdr8PBE7Qi94S-nea?dl=0

Ok, well my question then is what has convinced us that internal clocking is always superior other than it has been repeated quite a few times over the years?  Different, yes, I definitely agree with that but... "superior", in audio wouldn't that tend to be subjective?  I don't think an external clock presenting a sound that you enjoy more has to mean something isn't right...it's just different.  

If there’s no subjectivity to converters then we’d just choose which one to buy based off of spec sheets instead of listening to how they sound though wouldn’t we? That’s my point with how we choose to clock things, if I like how it sounds better I don’t really care how or why and I’m not going to go back to a setting what the spec sheet says should be better 😁 Also, as a converter manufacturer I wouldn’t exactly want to advertise that clocking my unit to another source may improve the sound so I can imagine how the “internal clock is superior” narrative got started.

I haven’t just tested this on older converters, I’ve done it with modern apogee & antelope for example. It still makes a difference to my ears. Sometimes better.

I'm not talking about the design holistically, neither am I talking about subjectivity in an overall sense. ADC has one job..

Some people prefer the old Lexicon units and they are just signal degraders really, I get it and IME or IMO technically correct can sound pretty boring sometimes. However we're talking about clocking actually increasing the performance of an easily measurable concept which is signal degredation. I have never seen anything that would point to an increase in performance via external clocking in a modern PLL system, you want to mash things up a bit by using an external clock then fine. Although again, I'd rather have the choice and I'm not the only one saying this. I'll quote Svart again and he's not selling converters anymore so there's no "narrative" to be found.

There's either two things going on here, the converter has been cheaped out / not very well designed or people might like a bit of jitter in their coffee?

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"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."

Both things are true in this gig:

You have to trust your ears.

You also have to be aware that you can fool yourself (like when you're making genius EQ moves in bypass).

The Lexicons were better than most modern reverbs because since they couldn't sound realistic at all and most modern reverbs don't really either, they had to have their algorithms designed holistically to sound like a good special effect with a wide variety of material. The frequency modulation and chorusing makes voices and guitars sound angelic. The random hall is huge and surreal. Unlike most modern flexible "clean" or "utilitarian" itb reverbs you can make sound AWFUL with most settings deviating from the carefully selected presets. The Alesis Midiverb II is iconic and didn't even have settings, it had 99 built in patches Good luck making something like Valhalla Shimmer, a Strymon Big Sky, or Liquidsonics Tai Chi sound as iconic, utilitarian, and adhering to the signal like that or the iconic Quadraverb Taj Mahal setting. Keith Barr pretty much wrote the best primitive Schroeder reverb possible, the distortion made it sound smaller and adher to noisy signals better, and with it, shoegaze was invented.

I’ll be sure to like more of Svart’s posts…I wasn’t aware we were counting likes. No one is questioning whether what you guys are telling us is scientifically true…what I AM asking is why I’m not hearing what you guys are telling me I hear. The problem with dogma is that when you (just referring generally here) tell me what you’re hearing, I go, “that’s weird, I don’t hear that at all.” When I tell you what I hear, you say, “that’s impossible. You’re fundamentally incorrect.” This is why we get into yelling matches over this stuff.

Just trust that I’m hearing what I’m telling you. I think if you were here, you’d hear the same thing. I appreciate Svart considering other possibilities and putting those out there. This is not about not believing in science, it’s about, “why am I hearing it this way when it’s supposed to not be this way.”