2. digital
  3. 1034869494

A digital revelation

Over the past year, I've been assembling a brand new system using Infinity Prelude MTS speakers, a Legacy power amp, a Parasound preamp and DH Labs speaker cables. Since this is also used as a home theater, I was using a JVC DVD player feeding an MSB Link III with upsampling. After the first few speaker placement and tweaking sessions, the sound was adequate but not consistently spectacular and I thought the missing ingredient might be equalization. I borrowed a DBX Quantum mastering processor for experimentation and found that in bypass (no eq), the sound was better than I'd ever heard before. The reason for this was that jitter was virtually eliminated by the processor. I couldn't afford a Quantum for this purpose but found that a Monarchy DIP performed quite well and was a major improvement even if it never quite approached the Quantum.

After searching for a while, I found a reclocking device called the XO3 ($118 USD). It's a small PC board with an ultra low jitter crystal, a power supply, and an S/PDIF reclocking circuit. You must have a CD player that uses one of 5(?) available clock speeds and you have to do some spicing and dicing inside the machine as well as figure a way to mount it and get the S/PDIF out of the box. This can require some ingenuity and patience but let me assure you the results are spectacular. It's obviously not for the cost-is-no-object crowd and it's much more painful than connecting a device like the DIP but I've never heard better digital. I've also hot rodded my MSB which probably helps too.

Has anyone out there had any experience with this device?
jlambrick

Showing 1 response by jlambrick

jlambrick OP
138 posts
 
The instructions with the unit are extremely general. I'm also an EE and I had to probe around with an oscilloscope to find the points to tap off of. I put the XO3 in a Marantz CD-67SE which uses some proprietary chips that are not listed in the XO3 instructions. Because of that, I had to rely on a little guesswork but it paid off.

I don't think it could be put into a DIP. I think the DIP contains a stabilizing PLL without any kind of a crystal (I could be wrong). The idea behind the XO3 is that it replaces the crystal oscillator in the CD player or transport and then using the S/PDIF signal that is generated by the transport, the edges are reclocked using that stable oscillator for an extremely low jitter digital output.

I bought mine from a company in Hong Kong and it took about a week to arrive. Here's the link:
http://www.diyhifisupply.com/parts/cd_xo_clock.html
More to discover