The Antelope Zodiac / Zodiac + / Zodiac Gold DAC Thread - Page 3

I have their OCX and 10m (Atomic Clock), so one of these may be a perfect match!

I've done the tests and while it improves the sound slightly, i do not hear any difference between this and foobar in windows OS.

simply put, it's a tax you gotta pay to play the music in osx environment. i have since installed windows 7 on mac pro with bootcamp and never bother with osx any more.

Agreed.

I don't think it's possible to eliminate jitter 100%.

Peete.

What?? Where did that quote even come from? We don't make such claims and if it's printed somewhere by us, please inform me so I can have it taken down!

We eliminate nearly all jitter using an atomic clock in our high end studio line, but even an atomic clock will lose a sample every 8 days, side by side with another atomic. In addition, then some carefully induced random jitter can enhance audio converting quality. So, by no means are we saying we eliminate jitter 100%.

Marcel James
antelopeaudio.com

I think that it is highly unlikely, considering Core Audio already is bit-perfect so the digital output quality depends on the hardware, not software. But then, I have not heard it and I'm not going to try.

32BITS 384KHZ? is useful for what may i ask? somebody said Future Proof? how far into the future are we talking about here? humans need to develop these audible senses first no? and don't we need to record at those rates first?

from what i know we are not even close to that. the clocks in benchmark and especially in Lavry are pretty much fantastic so adding something else will more than likely not do a thing.

For all intents and purposes, 99.999% of the musics are well covered by the 16/44.1. The last one bit of improvements can be had by 24/96khz. Beyond that point, I believe it's mostly marketing BS or intentional mock-up in the engineering process.

agreed

x2

Punk.

Did you bother to read the quote to which I made this reply ? Jitter free means absence of jitter but your beef is with the other member's post that made this claim and not my reaction to it.

Peete.

First:
Jitter is important for digital audio but atomic clock is not less jitter! Atomic clock offers time accuracy such as nanosecond drift over a long time. This is important in many applications but useless for audio. Even a poor crystal, say 500 parts per million will alter the pitch of the music by less then 1 cent (which no human can hear).

Also, a 100ppm crystal (pretty poor) will make hour music longer or shorter by 0.36 second, and no one would care. Jitter is important, and atomic clocks do not offer particularly good jitter. They cost a lot but that does nit change the facts.

Second
32 bits? We use a lot of bits for audio work station. We need that for mixing and editing of audio tracks. But the outcome is 24 bits or less. In fact, the individual audio channels recorded by an AD NEVER have 24 bit accuracy. 20 bits is real good! The other bits may be there but they are just random noise, not at all connected to the music. Those lower bits are the noise floor.
We are restricted to such noise levels because of analog noise in components but with careful design, we keep that noise low, as low as say 21 bits.

This is not bad! Why? Because the EAR can only hear a certain dynamic range (from the loudest to the lowest levels. Each bit is around 6dB so at 20 bits we have 120dB dynamic range. That is huge. A CD has only 16 bits thus 96dB and that is already pretty quiet.

If you stand next to a 747 engine (running), and call it the loudest you want to hear, then go to a sound isolation room and call it the lowest sound level, you have less then 126dB which is 21 bits. So who needs 32 bits? When it comes to digital audio workstation, you need that and more. For listening, no one needs even 24 bits.

Third
384KHz, as well as 192KHz is marketing driven, and it is NOT GOOD for best sound. Too slow is not good, and too fast is not good either. There is an optimal sample rate, and it is somewhere in the 60-70KHz. Of course there is no such standard so 48 or 88.2KHz is reasonable, and even 96KHz is just a bit too fast. I explained all that in great detail in my paper "Sampling Theory". The paper is too technical for some folks, I tried to keep is comprehensible...

Regards
Dan Lavry
Lavry Engineering

does anybody really want to argue with Dan Lavry?

This DAC has some nice looks though. If the looks can kill....

and it very well be the greatest sounding DAC ever created. nobody is saying it isn't.

under the "Connect" part to the right, referring to the "Aligned Clock Input"