What is the significance of different frequencies in Vivaldi Master Clock?

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I do not understand why Vivaldi master clock has different frequencies when everything could be locked to 44.1 and 48 respectively? Vivaldi isn’t intelligent like Mutec reclocker to detect sample rate based on input signal and set frequency accordingly.

Is there any benefit or improvements using higher multiples or stay with base 44.1 for Group1 and 48 for Group2? Issue is with Quboz and Tidal MQA streaming, which are both highly inconsistent in sample rates between tracks.

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Interesting question! Maybe @Phil or @James can clarify this.

From the manual I get the idea that setting a multiple of the base frequencies in the 2 clock groups is optional, as it says you can try . These frequencies are just to lock the word clock to the internal clock of the Upsampler and/ or DAC, not to the sample rates of the played music itself. That is done by the internal clock(s) of the latter.

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I’m a new Vivaldi owner. I purchased the DAC and Upsampler at the same time and just added the clock a few days ago. I am also wondering about the choice of base clock rates and what differences users may be experiencing. Of course one ultimately has to decide for him/herself from experience but I wonder what opinions folks might have on this ?

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No response from dCS guys? @Phil

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Hi Manel,

Thanks for flagging this…

As Erno has absolutely rightly said back in Oct, the clock is used for syncing the internal timings for the separate components, it isn’t used as the clock that is used for the audio itself so a 44.1kHz clock is absolutely fine for syncing devices playing 44.1/88.2/176.4kHz sample rates and a 48kHz clock is absolutely fine for syncing devices playing 48/96/192kHz sample rates …

Again, as Erno has also said you do have the option to change the output clock frequencies so you can try the higher clock frequencies if you wish and if you feel that it makes a positive difference then you can use them … you just need to have one output set as a 44.1kHz based clock and the other as a 48kHz based clock.

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Thanks for the reply :hugs:

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Hi Phil !

Thanks for the reply as always !

Still, per my earlier post, I’m wondering what experience users might be having with this. Is anyone hearing a difference by changing these base rates ? Sometimes I think I can hear a slight difference with 44.1/48 kHz sounding slightly better. But mostly I can’t. Has anyone else experimented with this?

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To be honest with you, I have not heard any difference setting the clocks differently. However, I found it useful in one case, which likely not even 0.1% of population would find it useful though :slight_smile:

I have an old Logitech Transporter and I found the different frequencies useful there. Logitech Transporter expects exact frequency clock input for the sample rates unlike dCS gear that can take any multiples of the base 44.1KHzand 48KHz.

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Hi iLuvmusic,
Thanks for the response ! Yours is a very interesting use-case. I hadn’t thought about using the clock with DACs that require the base clock rate to match the sample rate in use. As far as differences in sound with dCS gear, it must be that others don’t hear much difference either as comments about it are extremely under represented here on the community. If it made much difference, there’d probably be lots of posts about it here.
Again, thanks for the response !

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