Keeping clocks powered prior to/between use

I have no idea how to answer this, but welcome to sbaf. I've seen you post quite a bit lately, some nice contributions. Don't mind the frat humor on here. I despise any form of hazing, but just rest comfortable in the knowledge that some people here freely indulge in tube, power supply and warm up nervosa, while laughing at people asking questions about clocks inside DACs. Pretty insane, but... the world we live in.

 

Wavedream + PI2AES when new needed about a week of on time to sound its best. It seems to have dropped to 2-3 days in the 2 or so years I've used them together.

Over summer when it's steamingly hot and I am spending more time drinking drinks with umbrellas in I go into summer mode and power everything down in the evening, and use the USB input rather than the Pi2AES (whose clocks seems to take longer to stabilise than the Wavedream). It sounds less good, but nothing a couple more drinks with umbrellas in can't put to rights.

 

Some people think that much of this nervosa is, to put it politely, well over the top. Due to site culture (and Changstar was infinitely worse, in fact, toxic at times, which eventually closed it down) we are as likely to take the piss as to argue. Yes, I'm "guilty," although, of course, I wouldn't use that word.

Whilst I consider stuff like the necessity of fibre rather than copper ethernet to be pretty daft, I have strong doubts about expensive external clocks. According to my limited knowledge, external clocks are for keeping multiple sources in time, ie in certain pro applications.

But if I had had the money, would I have played with that kit (I'm too deaf now) --- well, maybe. And I do acknowledge the right of others to spend and enjoy as they can afford and wish.

But I also have the right to make occasional silly comments.

Anyway, I'm just the old guy in the corner who occasionally opens an eye and says, "Warrararararrawara WARAwarawara waraBOLLOCKS" and then goes back to sleep.

 

The ddc chips available in even budget solutions nowadays make the clock quality of a ddc matter less to most DAC's than it would have in the past, I reckon. Since syncing at all from my computer can be a feat in many scenarios, I find it impressive that any solution with an xu208 can do it. The chip in my older musical fidelity V2 was never quite that stable.

Going from using a topping D10s as a ddc to using a femtoclock-swapped douk u2 pro (both fed an ifi ipower x), the sq improvement is there, but less of a leap than reclocking the USB to the stock Vega xmos (which is from 2012 or 2013) was. I don't even think reclocking the USB line is worth it for modern DDC chips -- I have some experience that it adds timing issues, but timing tweaks mattered a lot more for the old crappy chips. Being like 7nm or w/e now allows the new ones tons of cores and cache and all that.

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It doesn't deserve to be called "frat humor" -- that doesn't capture how effeminate the behavior actually is. Comes from common autism sans the intelligence to make a gift of it, and just having a brain calcified in internet forum elitism, not anything masculine.

 

@tatsugiri, you should check out the line below the site name, at the top of the page. There are other sites where you might not have the same problems.

 

Why should I be nice to someone who's passive aggressive toward me for literally no reason? I wasn't even talking to you @Thad E Ginathom . I keep calling it effeminate because it was based in me having a rando tag and nothing I'm actually saying. Getting mad over my posting style for reasons he probably can't explain while others with similar experiences had cogent things to say. I wasn't lying about someone formerly dear to me, who had more invested in the hobby than probably anyone else, deciding it wasn't worth it over how much shit some people here talk

 

I'm still trying to understand what this thread is about. I don't think many around here will disagree that any device using OCXO, VCXO, or TCXO devices is better just left turned on, period. Leaving a DAC turned on all the time isn't neurosis; attaching multiple DDC's, digital filters, with various power supplies, however does tend towards neurosis. However, not many folks around here will complain that you're doing it wrong if you're content with leaving your whole curio cabinet full of DACs, DDCs, digital filtering devices, network switching gear, ethernet to optical converters, power filtering devices, and attendant power supplies turned on all the time.

If the problem is "things f**k up and sound bad when I turn them off and back on again!" well, then stop turning things off.

Am I completely missing something here?

 

Nah. Sorry, maybe I should have been a bit more clear. I can get interrupted constantly while posting from work :/ .

I was thinking maybe leaving DACs on all the time was neurosis since I only use the Vega's standby mode for being lower power than, say, my burson conductor. If I had a Schiit dac my impulse would be to turn it on maybe 2 hours before I want to use it, which bob's measurements support, and that's usually how I use my burson, but I guess it wouldn't be strange to many here to leave the burson on longer.

I could imagine someone having a "I turned my DAC off after it had been on for a year, and it sounded bad for a week!" story, but I've never had anything like that with my Vega.

 

Maybe a hot plate to keep it warm, just like the DQ3 exploit

 

Just leave it on. Do you turn your refrigerator off?

 

I don't know how familiar you were with this forum before you joined, but here's some friendly advice: observe. There's a lot of years and experience here and a lot of information that you can weed through. Sitting back and observing the culture will help you understand it better instead of getting offended and or/angry; you'll just "get it" and continue posting and living your life.

 

I thought it was kinda wild seeing atomicbob use an atomic clock with the modi multibit, but I recall Schiit saying they get those chips from medical equipment (right?), so they're all made for cost-no-object/non-consumer implementations. otoh I forget exactly how those function, but will look at info about them later (and how the R2R controllers work, since what you're saying about those is pretty interesting).

 

Because you just got here.

And it doesn't matter that you weren't talking to me, it's a forum. That means that, yes, there are individual exchanges, even sometimes heated ones, but they are not private and everything affects everyone.

"Randos" is just a nickname for newcomers. Yes, it is mildly condescending. What to say? Sorry? This is not a perfect place. There is no hazing. There used to be. People used to get jumped on for not introducing themselves, posting in the wrong threads, etc etc. Frankly it got a bit embarrassing: we must have put a lot of people off. We cooled it. The site was not really meant to be a totally open forum, but it got noticed and amazingly popular: I guess it took some of us a while to adjust to that.

We are what we are. Stay, share, enjoy (but don't please, spew venom) or go away.

That's all from me on keeping clocks turned on, and that's all from me on Tatsugiri.

Just a departing light moment: Should I keep my iron turned on? If I don't, it performs terribly badly, not removing the smallest crease, until it has reached some temperature at which it decides to start working...

 

OP, you’re using weirdo boutique audiophile bs and there’s little to no reason why a converter should have that behavior with it’s own internal clock or how it synchs external sources.

Resistor based DACs need temperature stabilization for the lower bits and resistor matching. The best implemented designs like the older super expensive Moffat and Lavry DACs usually used internal ovens.

But they’re really just an outmoded technology vs “multibit” delta sigma chips that audiophiles like to fetishize based on experiences with low end gear or past distortions. You can get delta sigma based das with all sorts of analog circuitry in them that distort in all sorts of different pleasurable ways. Audiophiles simply fetishize, yes fetishize, the old school R2R distortion from resistor mismatching, that live acoustic music or live playback through analog hardware (not vinyl. Think mic pres and a small console) lacks.

Well implemented R2R DACs usually lack this distortion in the treble and can be fairly clinical there like Yggdrasil and Lavry. They only have the weird bass. This means audiophiles seek out total crap and nos dacs demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of digital filters and the sampling theorem or go for minimum phase filters that still have delay but only over part of the frequency spectrum or have inadequate band rejection and they’re listening to aliasing exactly like extremely poor older digital processing.

Delta sigma da IC based DACs can still have a warm up time of under an hour or so if they have discrete components that must reach thermal equilibrium like Apogee (the IV stage) and Crane Song (the line amplifiers).

Yeah @purr1n Too aggressive of a jitter cleaning clock can sound like it’s remixing the music with artificial stereo width processing while bad clocks sound artificially mono. In the production phase on good mixes (most modern music is literally amateur hour with self production and then produced for loudness at the expense of all sound quality) processing is done to eliminate artificially hard panned sounds with delays and reverbs, intentionally using equipment with crosstalk which can be as high as -60 or so on the equipment’s own meters, and bus compressors that will change the stereo image of what is being fed into them based on the channel linking scheme. A clock that radically changes this is inaccurate.

Three big pro brands (apogee, motu, and rme) now use direct digital synthesis for clocking with no loss of image quality from the clock. And Apogee’s newer Symphony line (especially the desktop and SE modules) murders the other two and most hifi and pro things for sound quality despite the stupid form factors. It’s not even a competition.

 

I read and appreciated the rest of what you said, but want to clarify that the erratic behavior was due in part to EXACT clock mode on my DAC. Going back to the exotic car engine analogy purrin made, I have gear that makes me do extra work or have things extra-optimal to work. The benefit is a real boost in sound quality, even if the method is flawed. I *know* the method has to be flawed by modern standards, but I actually enjoy the game of it -- it's a DAC upgrade without making one.

A normal DAC would have synced with the ifi right away and maybe only sounded a bit worse for the warm up, but I'm just saying that my DAC is like a jitterscope in that it will skip over things not being *perfect*. What causes skips for me still does something to sound quality in other systems, I'd guess.

Like, if I use an older async ddc, it starts to matter which processes I run on my computer whether or not it will want to stay in sync with the DAC. I know I'm talking about goofy gear.

The EXACT mode gets around some limitations of the 2013 tech to my ears. As best as I can explain it objectively, the omission of processes allows it to send signals to the analog stage at tighter intervals. I think it's generally understood that doing less work in conversion is better, like how wasapi exclusive bypasses things windows does for sq. Something it does makes it sound more natural and nuanced, and I say that in huge part because I have another, more conventionally-well-designed but cheaper DAC I listen to much more often, and it's only with EXACT that the Vega really sounds more holographic, and all that, than that DAC. I do think that a newer DAC of similar quality would be able to run things as tight as the Vega without tomfoolery, but the Vega is far from garbage the way I'm running it, I'll say that much.

The other DAC I use is the Burson Conductor with an external ddc to bypass its awful one. I also use headphones that react horribly to harshness -- I think Zach discontinued the Verite pads because too few got good synergies with them? So I can say I really don't hear anything harsh or weird going on with the Vega in EXACT. It clowns the DACs I previously had in "the rats' nest" in terms of detail and dynamics: those being the wyred4sound DAC-2 (shit), and the NAD M51 (okay, but dull), so there's a metric if anyone ever thought those sounded decent enough.

When I originally got the Vega I had an SR009 rig as well, which first had the EC Electra for the amp, and then a Cavali Liquid Lightning (sn#10, since I've been told that matters), and I could evaluate the Exact clock without issues by using Jriver settings that cause audio lag. And with a setup that resolving, I only ever heard the mode do positive things. (Sorry, you're begging elaboration -- I know it's easy for someone to just think the most expensive weird thing they have is the best ever, so I want to genuinely let you know why I think it sounds decent)

 

I can't edit this in the last post anymore, lest I would.

On the subject of weirdo boutique audiophile bs, the least generous hypothesis I could make as to why the Vega's exact clock mode improves sq would be that Auralic saved money by making their "sanctuary" FPGA input stage unable to keep sync as well as a chip with more transistors may have been able to. I don't know anything about the sanctuary chip off-hand, but I realize there is always an unknown to weird FPGA designs. I have seen amir accuse Chord of using a lame dithering algorithm to save on logic $. I have no clue if he's right either. Since Auralic makes expensive streamers, they would have incentive to limit the true performance of their DAC to people who buy a product like that.