Slaving PC to external AD/DA unit

[dwk123]

The idea of bypassing jitter by using an spdif loopback arrangment to slave the PC to a crystal-based clock in an external unit comes up from time to time. I have finally gotten around to trying this by dusting off my old Art DI/O, and have verified that everything works great. I set the DI/O to 88k, slaved my Emu 1820M to the incoming spdif signal, and used the upsampler in foobar to match the 88k rate. (I didn't listen long enough to determine whether it makes much difference, though. The Emu 'session' arrangement makes it slightly tough to rapidly switch back-and-forth)

So, the question is: what external AD/DA units are amenable to this approach? Not all converters will actually use the local master clock for the DA section, and if the DA section uses the recovered spdif clock, then the effort is worthless. Since the DI/O uses the AK4524 integrated codec which has a single clock in put for both the AD and DA stages, I know that it uses the local clock when set as the master.

Since the DI/O is old and uses somewhat low-spec converters, I figured I'd see what else is out there before starting down the road of modding it into something better. Anyone looked at some of the mid-grade or higher gear with an eye towards this ?