I want to have my Aurender N20 word clock slaved to my MSB Premier + Digital Director setup. Which Word Clock Out connection should I use, the one on the DAC or Digital Director?
Regards,
Tareq
The one from the digital director.
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Hello. I have a Reference DAC with a digital director and am considering experimenting with putting a standalone DIRAC live processor (a minidsp flex) between my server (Taiko Audio extreme) and the digital director. I’d connect the minidsp to the digital director with toslink. My server has a Wordclock input and so I could connect the digital director wordclock output to that. But is there any point given that the server would not be connected directly to the director/DAC but rather would be connected via the minidsp flex (which does not have a wordclock terminal)?
I am not an expert, but was curious what Perplexity AI has to say, here is what I got back:
“Adding a miniDSP Flex DIRAC Live processor between your server (Taiko Audio Extreme) and your Reference DAC Digital Director does offer flexibility for room correction, but there are technical limitations around clocking. The miniDSP Flex does not have external word clock input or output terminals—its digital inputs (TOSLINK, SPDIF, USB) do not accept an external clock directly, which means it cannot sync to a master word clock in your chain.
When using digital audio connections like TOSLINK, the clock signal is embedded in the data stream, and most consumer-level devices (including miniDSP Flex) extract the clock from the incoming audio flow rather than from a dedicated word clock terminal. This means any standalone processor without a word clock input cannot directly cooperate with an external clock signal; your server and Digital Director won’t be syncing to a common master when using the miniDSP Flex as an insert device. The audio chain would be reliant on the internal clock of the miniDSP or the incoming signal via Toslink/SPDIF, often leading to increased jitter or less stable timing in comparison to chains with full word clock synchronization.
If maintaining tight word clock synchronization throughout the chain is a priority for your system’s performance—especially given your reference components—a device with word clock throughput is necessary. Inserting the miniDSP Flex will interrupt the clock sync unless your processor supports word clock I/O, which miniDSP Flex does not currently offer. In summary, unless miniDSP releases a processor with word clock support, you would lose the ability to synchronize your server and DAC via an external clock when introducing the miniDSP device into your digital audio chain.​”
Not sure if any of this is technical sound but give it a read.
Interesting thank you. In a very unscientific way I guess I was wondering if it helps that the signal from the server to the minidsp is synchronised with the DAC or whether that doesn’t make any difference because the minidsp will in any event “break” the clock chain
For a playback device, like a DAC, there is virtually zero difference in recovering the clock from the incoming S/PDIF or a separate word clock. There is zero difference in “synchronization” (it is extremely rare for exact frame alignment for any playback due to FIFOs and processing, only frequency matching) and extremely little to none for jitter. The only real improvement is that S/PDIF playback equipment may retain synchronization in the absence of an S/PDIF input. For ADCs it allows several ADCs to stay synchronized because they do not have the benefit of S/PDIF input.