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To clock or not to clock?

Hi,

I am considering adding the Esoteric G 05 clock to my system. 

My digital front end is an Esoteric K 01 XD which is connected with a USB cable to an Esoteric N 03 T operating in RAAT mode and connected to a Roon NUC via the LAN.

According the K01 manual, “the USB input does not support clock synchronization.”

So far, I have not tried out any other ways of connecting the K 01 to the N 03 T as I gather that, by using USB, both streamer and DAC are controlled by the same clock.  The USB connection also supports higher bit rates than RCA or optical.  So far, I have not come across 32-bit files in the wild.

My dealer lent me a TEAC clock.  While playing a high-quality CD the sound became very precise, almost etched, but not in a bad way.  Not sure how that would work out long term.  With a rather poor CD the added precision was not helpful at all.

The K01 has a Grandioso Custom VCXO II clock; the G05 is a SXT 03 OCXO clock.  I know nothing about clocks, and I wonder if the G05, being only a clock, would improve upon the K01 clock.

As I stream about 80% of the time, to really benefit from a better clock it would be necessary to change the way of connecting the DAC to the streamer and have both devices synchronized by the G05.

I would be grateful for any advice on this idea, especially from people who have tried a similar move.

paleo12

Showing 1 response by lalitk

lalitk's avatar
lalitk
5,067 posts
 

A high quality external master clock matters. The clocking of digital audio signals is crucial to achieve the highest transparency, a better clock simply gets you closer to the heart and soul of a performance. In your case, you would need to step up to Esoteric G-01X or G-02X master clock to make it worthwhile. Either a G-01X or G-02X connected to K-01XD and N-03T simultaneously will improve the performance of both devices. Don’t sweat the USB connection, you may end up preferring Coax over USB and vice versa.

I recommend a loaner G-01X or G-02X clock from your dealer with good BNC clock cables and Coax Cable and dive in. Implementation is a key here, this level of performance is not cheap but totally worthwhile if your components are designed to accept a HQ master clock.

You may check out my digital system, both streamer and DAC are driven by master clock. Once you experience a properly implemented high quality master clock, you wouldn’t have it any other way. 

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