Sorry, Charlie.......
That isn't a clock board. It is something that I threw together to allow a fellow forum member to get their CDP back up and running.
After they tried to implement something that they saw on Lars' website. Which was wrong to begin with.
As Phred would say "RTFM!" Or text in this case, the text.
As for clocks..........various versions of something that I have played with have been posted several times. Just don't ask me where. My memory isn't that good anymore.
BTW......Lars......if you think that I can't make PCBs that look "professional", then you maybe you need to rethink your position.
Jocko
That isn't a clock board. It is something that I threw together to allow a fellow forum member to get their CDP back up and running.
After they tried to implement something that they saw on Lars' website. Which was wrong to begin with.
As Phred would say "RTFM!" Or text in this case, the text.
As for clocks..........various versions of something that I have played with have been posted several times. Just don't ask me where. My memory isn't that good anymore.
BTW......Lars......if you think that I can't make PCBs that look "professional", then you maybe you need to rethink your position.
Jocko
Is the Tent Clock for commercial manufactures? Any commercial product with this clock incorporated? Just asking?carlosfm said:
Is the Tent clock only for DIY?!
I wouldn't be surprized if one of these days he starts selling 1k+ quantities for a major brand.
This sentence seams like an insult.
Jocko, Lars, and others, what are you talking about really? It sounds more like a quarrel than exchange of ideas. So far I have seen very little physical stuff from the guys who screams the most. The same guys aren't very active in design and circuit critique when it comes to Gainclones and simlilar so I wonder if they can't give any real input. Not a single word so far (maybe I'm wrong here).
Not very common approach in appearance. 
Well, Per......
If you recall........
I refered to that board as a "design exercise". It was one of those attempts to try something different. Something that some here accuse us EEs of never trying.
As for examples.........yes, I do have some. But, a lot of it is covered by NDAs, not only what, but for whom.
So.......you will just have to take my word that if you knew I have done consulting for, you would soil yourself.
So, just take my word for it.............
Let's put it this way:
Sometimes I get paid in Euros.
As for what Lars is talking about......he is poking a stick at veroboard style thingie that I threw together to get someone's CDP up after they could not get Lars' circuit to work.
So much for "professional" looking vs. actually working.
Jocko
If you recall........
I refered to that board as a "design exercise". It was one of those attempts to try something different. Something that some here accuse us EEs of never trying.
As for examples.........yes, I do have some. But, a lot of it is covered by NDAs, not only what, but for whom.
So.......you will just have to take my word that if you knew I have done consulting for, you would soil yourself.
So, just take my word for it.............
Let's put it this way:
Sometimes I get paid in Euros.
As for what Lars is talking about......he is poking a stick at veroboard style thingie that I threw together to get someone's CDP up after they could not get Lars' circuit to work.
So much for "professional" looking vs. actually working.
Jocko
Jocko: The usual smoke blowing from your part... Life is too short!
Carlos: I missed either your postal address or the frequency you use..... I can't send it to you without these.
I really don't agree with Your statement about expensive clock in cheap players. The whole idea of upgrading is to get the sound of an expensive player, without having to spend thousands of dollars.
I know some people find it a little bit hard to accept that the upgrade parts cost could more than the player itself. I look at it as a total cost of the player with upgrade, which is considerably lower than what you'd have to pay for a factory player with same sound quality. So if the player is cheap to begin with, but still has good transport and DAC chips, that only makes it better.
In fact when you go up in price on a CD player you would most often find the exact same parts inside that you also find in a cheap player. That's because some manufacturers buy cheap players, and moves the guts to another enclosure with their own brand name on it, and then the price tag is multiplied 5 - 10 times or so. No value added except brand name!
An example is the Pioneer PDS 507. This player is seen in numerous enclosures at prices up to 5-6000 $ even if the Pioneer original only costs i think around 300 $.
So actually i don't care if the player cost 69$ in the supermarket, and then if i have to spend 300$ in upgrade parts to get the sound right, then you just have a player with good sound for 369$..... Pretty cheap.
In reality this way you make sure that your money are spent on sound quality, not on a fancy gold plate on the front, or other things you don't care about.
You can buy cheap clocks, and again some of them might work better than the CD player's original clock. Measurements of jitter and noise show that you can hardly make it any worse than it is in the player, because there is always a lot of noise on the supply lines of the clock generator. Some times there is enough modulation on the supply line that you can actually hear the music in the clock signal. (Try yourself: connect a PC speaker to the output of your clock generator...Don't use your stereo as the clock signal might damage something.).
A clock circuit with a separate power supply, will free the clock signal from music signal dependent jitter. On the other hand if the new clock has random jitter (not music modulated), you might get added room around the instruments, but in this case it is artificial room. I have done a lot of experiments with this after some german company started to sell artificial jitter generators for DAC's. It adds space to the stage, but not correct space. Everything is blown up to unnatural size.
Now whether Tent's clock is good or not i really can't say, as i never tried one out. However i know how hard it is to get it exactly right on clocks, and how many small things can go wrong
causing the performance to deter. One thing is susceptibility to airborn digital noise inside the CD player. Those clocks that are built on single layer PCB's with large parts, stacked up like a haystack. They are inevitably very sensitive to airborn noise.
They may measure OK in a lab environment, but when mounted in a CD player, noise is injected everywhere, infecting the clock signal with jitter. CMOS oscillators are very sensitive to power supply random noise, PECL generators have very noisy input stages compared to a low noise transistor. At small signal levels that comes from a crystal this can cause random jitter too.
So i don't agree that a cheap player should also have cheap upgrade parts. You can still get real good value for high end upgrade parts, even if you use them in a cheap machine. You
often find very good DAC's even in super cheap players.
In the same way poor upgrade parts will not be very helpful in an expensive player.
I just purchased a Harman Kardon HD740 from a friend, it has the PCM1702 DAC chips so i figured some good might come out of this cheap player. I paid 300 $ for it. From factory it sounds compressed, dark, closed and with a flat sound stage. Now i spent a couple of evenings doing mods on it, and i ended up bypassing most of the analog stage, and only using the first opamp stage (changed to AD8066) with a first order filter added. The signal is taken directly from the opamp through Black gate caps to the plugs. Now it starts to sound relaxed, open and with an airy top. Next step is a clock, because it still has the flat sound stage.
Carlos: I missed either your postal address or the frequency you use..... I can't send it to you without these.
I really don't agree with Your statement about expensive clock in cheap players. The whole idea of upgrading is to get the sound of an expensive player, without having to spend thousands of dollars.
I know some people find it a little bit hard to accept that the upgrade parts cost could more than the player itself. I look at it as a total cost of the player with upgrade, which is considerably lower than what you'd have to pay for a factory player with same sound quality. So if the player is cheap to begin with, but still has good transport and DAC chips, that only makes it better.
In fact when you go up in price on a CD player you would most often find the exact same parts inside that you also find in a cheap player. That's because some manufacturers buy cheap players, and moves the guts to another enclosure with their own brand name on it, and then the price tag is multiplied 5 - 10 times or so. No value added except brand name!
An example is the Pioneer PDS 507. This player is seen in numerous enclosures at prices up to 5-6000 $ even if the Pioneer original only costs i think around 300 $.
So actually i don't care if the player cost 69$ in the supermarket, and then if i have to spend 300$ in upgrade parts to get the sound right, then you just have a player with good sound for 369$..... Pretty cheap.
In reality this way you make sure that your money are spent on sound quality, not on a fancy gold plate on the front, or other things you don't care about.
You can buy cheap clocks, and again some of them might work better than the CD player's original clock. Measurements of jitter and noise show that you can hardly make it any worse than it is in the player, because there is always a lot of noise on the supply lines of the clock generator. Some times there is enough modulation on the supply line that you can actually hear the music in the clock signal. (Try yourself: connect a PC speaker to the output of your clock generator...Don't use your stereo as the clock signal might damage something.).
A clock circuit with a separate power supply, will free the clock signal from music signal dependent jitter. On the other hand if the new clock has random jitter (not music modulated), you might get added room around the instruments, but in this case it is artificial room. I have done a lot of experiments with this after some german company started to sell artificial jitter generators for DAC's. It adds space to the stage, but not correct space. Everything is blown up to unnatural size.
Now whether Tent's clock is good or not i really can't say, as i never tried one out. However i know how hard it is to get it exactly right on clocks, and how many small things can go wrong
causing the performance to deter. One thing is susceptibility to airborn digital noise inside the CD player. Those clocks that are built on single layer PCB's with large parts, stacked up like a haystack. They are inevitably very sensitive to airborn noise.
They may measure OK in a lab environment, but when mounted in a CD player, noise is injected everywhere, infecting the clock signal with jitter. CMOS oscillators are very sensitive to power supply random noise, PECL generators have very noisy input stages compared to a low noise transistor. At small signal levels that comes from a crystal this can cause random jitter too.
So i don't agree that a cheap player should also have cheap upgrade parts. You can still get real good value for high end upgrade parts, even if you use them in a cheap machine. You
often find very good DAC's even in super cheap players.
In the same way poor upgrade parts will not be very helpful in an expensive player.
I just purchased a Harman Kardon HD740 from a friend, it has the PCM1702 DAC chips so i figured some good might come out of this cheap player. I paid 300 $ for it. From factory it sounds compressed, dark, closed and with a flat sound stage. Now i spent a couple of evenings doing mods on it, and i ended up bypassing most of the analog stage, and only using the first opamp stage (changed to AD8066) with a first order filter added. The signal is taken directly from the opamp through Black gate caps to the plugs. Now it starts to sound relaxed, open and with an airy top. Next step is a clock, because it still has the flat sound stage.
PA: Only costs 69$ to find out....
Try it, i think you will be surprised about the quality level of DAC chips found even in the lowest price range.
We bought one from the local supermarket at this price, just to see, and it had some Wolfson 24 bit 192 kHz DAC chips inside (-98 dB THD). I have seen brand new 5000$ machines with worse than that.
The transport looked and worked ok, So with a new op-amp, and a clock ......
OK the enclosure didn't look like a million $............ so it stayed an experiment
Try it, i think you will be surprised about the quality level of DAC chips found even in the lowest price range.
We bought one from the local supermarket at this price, just to see, and it had some Wolfson 24 bit 192 kHz DAC chips inside (-98 dB THD). I have seen brand new 5000$ machines with worse than that.
The transport looked and worked ok, So with a new op-amp, and a clock ......
OK the enclosure didn't look like a million $............ so it stayed an experiment
Don't try this at work!!!
Yes, I do a lot of that stuff.
As for what I listen to.......it a mishmash of stuff.........current projects that I am trying to find a "client" for......old prototypes.........stuff that guys send me to rework......
But nothing that was "factory made". And yes....that means that my system is constantly changing. Except for the speakers. Which were factory made.
And then mucked up by me. Sometimes with active crossovers. Which made amp developement a hassle.
So I stopped designing amps. "Life is too short".
(Actually.....I have 2 sets of speakers........one of which can count one of the designers and one of the technicians as fellow forum members. They would kill me if I ratted them out..........! Even though the company went bust over 20 years ago.)
Some of my really good stuff I do keep under wraps. Circuits that I build just for grins usually get posted here, maybe not in the final version, but something close. You never know when something sitting around may find life in somewhere it was never intended.
Any other questions?
(BTW......Carlos....I wasn't refering to you.........it was that other guy.)
Jocko
Yes, I do a lot of that stuff.
As for what I listen to.......it a mishmash of stuff.........current projects that I am trying to find a "client" for......old prototypes.........stuff that guys send me to rework......
But nothing that was "factory made". And yes....that means that my system is constantly changing. Except for the speakers. Which were factory made.
And then mucked up by me. Sometimes with active crossovers. Which made amp developement a hassle.
So I stopped designing amps. "Life is too short".
(Actually.....I have 2 sets of speakers........one of which can count one of the designers and one of the technicians as fellow forum members. They would kill me if I ratted them out..........! Even though the company went bust over 20 years ago.)
Some of my really good stuff I do keep under wraps. Circuits that I build just for grins usually get posted here, maybe not in the final version, but something close. You never know when something sitting around may find life in somewhere it was never intended.
Any other questions?
(BTW......Carlos....I wasn't refering to you.........it was that other guy.)
Jocko
Jocko Clock
Guy's, Jocko has designed on hell of a clock. I have PS audio transport and I had redesigned the clock to get rid of the ringing on the square wave. My modification sound much better the factor implementation, but........
Well I have had one of Jocko clock's for a while in my PS transport and it not only good looking PCB it was 100% better than mine. I never really cared too much about his schematic or design, I mean that his deal , however I'd put his clock up against anyone's being sold.
Guy's, Jocko has designed on hell of a clock. I have PS audio transport and I had redesigned the clock to get rid of the ringing on the square wave. My modification sound much better the factor implementation, but........
Well I have had one of Jocko clock's for a while in my PS transport and it not only good looking PCB it was 100% better than mine. I never really cared too much about his schematic or design, I mean that his deal , however I'd put his clock up against anyone's being sold.
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