Clocking and jitter

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Good clock stability is probably the single most important issue separating good-quality analogue interfaces from the rest.  With the linearity of modern A/D and D/A converter chips beginning to rival and exceed the performance of the best analogue circuits, digital recordings would already be  ‘beyond reproach’ if clock stability did not so often degrade their potential quality.

 

Why is good clock stability so rare?  Probably because most conversion equipment has to compromise between clock stability, operational requirements and cost.  The ideal clock system in an A/D or D/A converter would be ultimately stable, i.e. would exhibit no jitter (frequency variations) at the point of conversion, whether operating from an internal clock or from an external synchronization reference of any format and at any sample rate.  But this is a very tall order for circuit designers, especially if they are on a budget.

 

 

Why are good clocks so rare?

 

Most analogue interfaces can provide workmanlike performance when internally clocked, since this is only a matter of providing a stable clock oscillator (or range of oscillators) at a fixed frequency (or frequencies) – although even this is not always well-executed.  The real problem is that in many installations the analogue interfaces can almost never operate from their own internal clocks since they must be slaved to an external reference sync, or maybe to a clock from a host computer.

 

The externally-clocked design challenge has traditionally been a trade-off. since the more stable a clock oscillator is, the less is its range of frequency adjustment: but we would ideally like an oscillator which can operate over a wide range of sample rates, perhaps from <44.1kHz to >48kHz, plus multiples thereof.  But such an oscillator would inevitably have poor stability – at least in terms of the stringent requirements for high-quality audio conversion.  On the other hand, if we limit the range of rates at which the oscillator needs to operate to small ‘islands’ around the standard sample rates we could use a bank of oscillators, selecting the appropriate oscillator according to our desired sample rate.  But this is expensive and, in any case, the 'pull-range' of an ordinary quartz crystal oscillator is still generally insufficient to meet the tolerance demands of the digital audio interfacing standards.

 

As well as a very stable clock oscillator, a good sounding converter must have a PLL (phase-locked loop) with a loop-filter which steeply attenuates incoming reference jitter towards higher frequencies. Unfortunately, even if sourcing equipment provides a reference clock with low jitter, cabling always adds unacceptable amounts, especially poor quality or high-capacitance cable, which results directly in sampling jitter in the analogue interface if jitter-filtering is inadequate. 

 

Prism Sound's unique CleverClox technology breaks these traditional constraints, allowing a low jitter clock to be re-created from any reference sync, no matter how much jitter it has and no matter what its frequency.

 

But why is clock jitter so important?

 

 

Analysis of sampling jitter

 

Analysis of sampling jitter (small variations in the sampling intervals of an A/D or D/A converter) shows that it produces a similar effect to phase modulation, where distortion components appear as  ‘sidebands’ spaced away from the frequency of a converted tone by the frequency of the jitter itself.  These components get louder as the amount of jitter increases, but also as the frequency of the converted tone increases.   So sampling jitter produces distortions which should sound much worse than conventional analogue harmonic distortions, since the spurious components appear at aharmonic frequencies.  High audio frequencies should suffer worse distortion than low frequencies.  For low-frequency jitter, the resulting distortion sidebands appear close in frequency to the audio signals which produce them – this should mean that they are ‘masked’ from our hearing by the same psycho-acoustic phenomenon upon which are based sub-band (perceptual) coding schemes such as MPEG.  This is fortunate, since it is quite difficult for a PLL to remove jitter to a good degree even at moderate frequencies, but for very low frequencies it would be very difficult indeed.

 

The graph below shows the effects of 'JTEST', a special test stimulus to expose jitter susceptibility of D/A converters.  JTEST is basically an fs/4 tone (12kHz at fs=48kHz) which is specially coded to cause an AES3 or S/PDIF carrier transmitted over a lossy cable to become very jittery by the time it reaches the receiving D/A converter.  The jitter produced has regular frequency components fs/96 apart (500Hz at fs=48kHz).  The quality of the D/A converter's jitter rejection is shown by the degree to which it suppresses the resulting 500Hz-spaced side-tones.  In the example below, the upper trace shows the poor jitter rejection of 'conventional' D/A converter design, where the conversion clock is derived directly from the AES3 or S/PDIF receiving chip, without any further jitter filtering.  Remember that none of these side-tones is present in the digital audio signal - they are caused only by jitter.  The lower trace shows almost complete jitter rejection across the band by the CleverClox process in Orpheus.

 

 

 

Listening experience

 

In practice, it seems that the benefits of careful clock design are very apparent in listening tests.  On the other hand, it can sometimes be difficult to expose the shortcomings of converters with poor clocks, because these units often have other analogue problems whose severity might obscure jitter-related effects.

 

In general, some of the widely-noted effects of sampling jitter are not surprising – for example the muddying of brass, strings and high-frequency percussion and the loss of stereo (or multi-channel) imaging.  These are well explained by the worse distortions which result in the lab at loud, high frequencies, and the way that sampling jitter produces quiet, aharmonic components, perhaps only subliminally perceptible, which blur our impression of the ambience which creates a soundstage.

 

Other effects are harder to explain – for example there is wide observation that large amounts of sampling jitter can take the edge off extreme bass rendition.  Such reports are probably too widespread to be ignored, but defy explanation within current theory.

 

 

Orpheus and CleverClox

 

Orpheus is designed to source clocks which are as stable and accurate as possible, and also with the aim of being insensitive to the quality of incoming clocks.  It is designed to remove jitter from any selected reference sync source before it is used as a conversion timebase, so as to eliminate any audible effects of sampling jitter, whatever sync source is used.

 

Orpheus does this with the help of Prism Sound's unique CleverClox clock technology, which removes the jitter from any selected clock source down to sub-sonic frequencies, without the need for a narrow-band quartz VCO.  CleverClox can adapt to any reference, irrespective of frequency, and regardless of how much jitter it has, derives an ultra-stable conversion timebase.