Clock synchronisation between MiniDSP Flex and Arcam rDAC?

[1niltothe]

Experimenting with running two systems at once, using Audio Hijack from macbook.

in a recent experiment, using equipment no longer available, the bluetooth system 5.1 seemed to drift out of synch slightly with the audio interface 5.1 system.

Most likely culprit was clocks being different.

rDAC and MiniDSP both have S/PDIF and ADAT, would it be possible or even necessary to synchronise them somehow?

Truthfully it could be that once they're up and running, the clocks are fine, they don't slowly drift apart - haven't got there yet

partly posting this out of curiosity, interest, learning etc - it's all a bit new and can be overwhelming approached purely from reading the manual

 

[Vincent Kars]

the bluetooth system 5.1 seemed to drift out of synch slightly with the audio interface 5.1 system.

Out of sync or just some more latency? Bluetooth can have substantial latency, 150 ms is not uncommon.

As SPDIF is a real timestream, I do think is hard to imagine how the slave e.g. the DAC can get out of sync with the source. It can't go faster as there will be no data and if it goes slower there will be a buffer overrun so a lot of static or silence.

 

[ThatSoundsGood]

When clocking goes wrong you will normally hear clicks and pops.

 

[1niltothe]

Thanks. It was quite a strange problem last time - the bluetooth side of the system - it wasn't just out of synch by a fixed amount (easy to rectify)

the synch gap would change - like between sessions sometimes - and also during sessions, drifting out of synch

it was a bit random and the project basically ended

during the exploration I posted on here a question about it and it seemed the mostly likely candidate was the clocks being a bit different, although this could be an assumption that's not linked with reality in this case

anyhow moving forward I'm not using any bluetooth so I doubt that problem will re-emerge