How good can a clock be?

[bzr]

Thought that some would be interested in this.

The Femto 140 Clock Measurements

We deal in detail with clock measurement issues in our description of the MSB Galaxy Clock. The Femto 140 a little less than twice the jitter of the Galaxy Clock, or about 140 femtoseconds (.14 picoseconds). In spite of that, it is still orders of magnitudes better than standard high-end audiophile clocks.

The MSB Femto 140 has amazing noise performance with a guaranteed jitter measurement at the worse case of just 1 Hz away from the ideal clock frequency of less than 140 femtoseconds (0.140 picoseconds). OK, so here is another pretty unbelievable jitter specification. We better stop right here and share our ideas about specifications.

Just as we broke new ground with our Ladder DAC design, 32x Digital Filters, Upsampling to 32 bit 384 kHz, and making the first 384 kHz USB connection, we have done something totally different and groundbreaking with this new clock. Jitter this low is very hard to measure and I am sure the mathematicians can argue about the exact test method that should be used and the exact numbers for years, but the fact of the matter is that this clock makes a huge sonic difference, and thats what counts. Our goal was great sound, not great measurements. We also know that it is far more important in a DAC design where you put the clock, and how you transmit and receive the clock at the DACs themselves. The potential jitter added in these areas far exceed the clock jitter anyway. A poor implementation of this clock may add 1000 times the clock jitter to the DAC output! The DAC IV was designed from the ground up with this clock in mind, so the implementation is very clean.

How long is a femtosecond? It is one millionth of one billionth of a second. Visible light oscillates with a period of about 2 femtoseconds. So forget about measuring clock jitter in picoseconds. MSB has now brought a new reference to the industry!

[John James]

I feel old!

[bzr]

[redm]

Originally Posted by bzr

Just as we broke new ground with our Ladder DAC design, 32x Digital Filters, Upsampling to 32 bit 384 kHz, and making the first 384 kHz USB connection, we have done something totally different and groundbreaking with this new clock.

Thats one way to end the controversy over 44.1Khz and 192Khz

[jdandy]

Kev.......This level of clock accuracy in the analog to digital and digital to analog conversion process is astonishing. In what manufacturer's components can we expect to see this level of accuracy, and when?

[bzr]

Dan this is one of the clocks that MSB is using at the moment. The upgrade from this is to the Femto Galaxy clock that I have in my DAC IV

[jdandy]

Kev.......I had no idea. Thank you.

[JohnThomas]

Kev,

Did you decide to keep your MSB stack? I'll be upgrading to the Diamond dac in January.

[bzr]

Hey John, yes I did keep it. I tried the K-03 but it wasn't quite there for me as well as it doesn't have enough options on the input side of things.

[Elberoth]

I would like to see phase noise measurements of this clock. It can easily be done and would tell us a lot abot the clock accuracy. Not sure why they have problems with that ... ?