knowwhatimsayin?
Has anybody experimented with good wordclocks like the Lucid, Apogee, etc?
A studio owner I know swears by clocks and talks about them like they’re fine wine. He uses lots of dated equipment but says it all gets straightened out with the clock.
Can anyone relate to that? I don’t have junk but I don’t have fine wine either. Maybe an investment in a clock is a good long term investment as long as your current & future equipment has wordclock I/O.
no cents
Err, he’s right that clocks are very imortant to digital audio. For a home recordist, it would be about the ast thing I would put money into though. You will get further with decent mics, pres, and room treatment. A good clock is just icing on the cake IMO.
I’ve heard that term used a few times around here… Just as a guess, I’m thinking that a “world-clock” is some sort of sync device that different pieces of digital equipment use for common timing? Can anyone cite an example of how this would be used? What types of things would need to be sync’d together? I totally understand that a 24-track studio using 3 8-track ADATS would have to have them in sync with each other, but what else? 
You can use an external clock for several things. Many devices have their own clock built in (sound cards, outboard convertors, certain instruments with digital outs). The idea here is that those clocks generally aren’t steller so you want a real nice top quality clock to keep jitter to an absolute minimum. So you paid $3k for top end Apogee convertors, but the clock in them isn’t as good as it could be. You add some big money clock to keep all the devices in perfect sample sync and elminate the artifacts caused from a poor clock.
Seeing that absolutely everything in digital is sample based, the clock is critical. Different clocks will differ from one another in how long a second is, or how even it chops the second into 44,100 pieces. Think of a long sausage as one second, a butcher with a slicer will cut it into 10 even pieces better than you will with just a knife. You’ll get 10 pieces more or less even, but there may be slight variation in thickness. (worst analogy ever…) You can have some drift and an external quality clock helps fix this problem.
Bubba, are you from Baton Rouge? That could explain your sausage analogy. People down there love their highly spiced sausages, especially in gumbo. Personally I like the idea of evenly sliced sausage segments, but I don’t imagine a butcher is gonna stand there all day and cut like a machine. Who wants improperly sliced sausage in their gumbo?
I know a clock is probably the last thing most people here (including me) should be looking into, but I have heard some recordings that were markedly improved with a good clock. The examples I heard could be compared to an out of focus photograph vs a sharp, clear accurately focused photo.
The card I use is affected by mouse movements and keyboard activity- especially if they’re usb devices. The clock timing gets thrown off apparently because its so unstable.
As I mentioned the clock idea is a long term investment. It would seem to make more sense to just get a better sound card, but if this one would improve drastically with a clock then I could see keeping it. When I do upgrade to a better card, it will still benefit from the good clock, so the investment for the long term.
no cents
I have a feeling a clock wouldn’t do much for you. I would guess you have some other PCI bus RFI going on or something along those lines.
Nope, not from Louisiana. Though I know all about andouille and boudin. 