Cybershaft Platinum Review (External Clock & PS)

[JSmith]

What a useless clock. There's no display, so the user still doesn't know what time it is

They should contact Flava Flav... he knows what time it is.


JSmith

 

[PeteL]

Only ads are influenced by your browsing history. "Organic" search results are not. Those are ranked based on popularity of the general internet around those keywords. In other words, everyone would see the same ranking for those keywords.

I don't know, I'm sure your site is certainly more popular than most manufacturers so in all cases it would come first, but I don't think it's the whole story. When I ran a company my site was coming up way higher on my computer than with others. There is also this, don't ask me if its fact checked, it was from a quick search. https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/

 

[DonR]

Rubidium clocks from old cell tower base stations used to be available very cheaply on the secondary market.

I built a GPSDO into a video distribution amplifier. Unfortunately, these devices have phase noise characteristics only as good as the OCXO used. Mine is 115db/hz @ 10hz. Up until a few years ago, GPSDO's with aged (used) OCXO's were as low as $40 on ebay.

 

[DonR]

The device is supposedly a precision clock.

But, there's nothing in this review about the accuracy of the absolute frequency, the inherent jitter in the clock itself (not a downstream connected D/A converter) or the short/long term drift. At least connect a frequency counter on the thing and confirm it's 10.000MHz.

... and for completeness test the output ripple of that "Pure" power supply, not that it will make a difference either.

 

[DonR]

Looking at the company's webpage on the device, the phase noise seems quite good for an OCXO so its probably a decent enough quality one. Obviously there is no material improvement over most DAC clocks but at least they are using quality parts: 　

Phase noise: -109.0 dBc / Hz or less at offset 1 Hz-130 dBc / Hz or less at offset 10 Hz

Their $6,500 model is -121dBc / Hz @ 1 Hz which is very good indeed.... but pointless.

The PSU uses an LT3045 regulator which has a 0.8uVrms ripple. Very good but, once again, pointless. My guess is they have an instrumentation engineer designing these things.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Only ads are influenced by your browsing history. "Organic" search results are not. Those are ranked based on popularity of the general internet around those keywords. In other words, everyone would see the same ranking for those keywords.

Not in my experience. Or if so it wasn't as recently as 2 years ago. I've used duckduckgo and startpage since then. Start page is unfiltered Google results.

 

[HammerSandwich]

Oof, that's less Cybershaft, more Cyber-Shafted!

Usually, we have to wait for the teardown before the jokes write themselves.

 

[ousi]

The casing looks pretty good though

This busted the myth of the external clock “upgrade”, like some of the high end brand claimed (Estoeric, DCS, etc). No wonder I heard no difference when using and not using external clock with my K03XD. Guess I don’t need to “upgrade” with their 15K atomic clock then

I used to have a stack of DCS which has clock output from the upsampler to the DAC, that kinda make some sense. But this one having only 1 output, the other logical case would be to use in some lab equipment.

Thanks @amirm for measuring and clear up another myth that’s so popular in the industry nowadays.

 

[DACs_Lover]

Audiofool magazines very very hate Amir. But I love him.

Long Live Amir and Audiosciencereview.com

 

[Spocko]

Maybe I`m going to say something unpopular in terms of the discussion but this is actually good product. Way overprized of course but imo idea was to upgrade old DAC`s where it is to expected that internal clock is not state-of-art. As SMSL has modern clock, now precision like 10 ppm or 50 ppm is typical and cheap. So if this external clock does not change operations on modern DAC that means performance itself is like any modern oscillator.
For device with external wordclock input let`s say from 2000 this could be somehow of upgrade. Way overprized of course.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a modern Topping DAC for half the price of this external clock?

 

[jsrtheta]

For a start, the USB audio class 2 asynchronous transfers and the "resampling/Reclocking" tech for SPDIF recovery all stems from about 10 years ago. That's where all issue with jitter in effect litterally dissapeared. It's a fact but now the argument :"show me the measurment or it's false" is a bit moot, You need the gear for this. Most where working with simple scopes and eye diagrams, it was quite easy to assess but asking for jitter measurments on old techs is just debating for the sake of it. In the 90s That was poor, and even if you had a good clock in your DAC it didn't matter much because you where not immune to the clocking of the source device, and the cable losses and interferences. that being a computer or a CD transport. A single quality clock synchronising both the source and the sink together made sense then.

Did we live through the same '90s?

 

[jsrtheta]

http://amorgignitamorem.nl/Audio/Jitter/Detection%20threshold%20for%20distortions%20due%20to%20jitter%20on%20digital%20audio%2026_50.pdf

How does that study make a case for the audibility of jitter? It seems to say the opposite.

 

[GeekyBastard]

Looking at the company's webpage on the device, the phase noise seems quite good for an OCXO so its probably a decent enough quality one. Obviously there is no material improvement over most DAC clocks but at least they are using quality parts: 　

Phase noise: -109.0 dBc / Hz or less at offset 1 Hz-130 dBc / Hz or less at offset 10 Hz

Their $6,500 model is -121dBc / Hz @ 1 Hz which is very good indeed.... but pointless.

The PSU uses an LT3045 regulator which has a 0.8uVrms ripple. Very good but, once again, pointless. My guess is they have an instrumentation engineer designing these things.

A scam will always be a scam, no matter what quality part they used.

 

[thorvat]

For products such as this one a new panther should be introduced. I recommend something similar as on the picture below, as products such as this one are trying to steal your money offering absolutely no improvement in SQ.

 

[bidn]

I do, which is why I use duckduckgo.com as much as possible. Also use Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin and Facebook Container in FireFox.

ASR is pretty good (thanks @amirm)

View attachment 182143

It's about all I can do without a VPN.

Excellent that you use these extensions!
I think that everyone cautious about privacy should!

I too use browser extensions (privacy badger, U block, + others on my PC ) + a VPN, + various browsers (chrome, Yandex, Brave...), and yet the google search sites like google.com will still link my searches with the lP assigned by the VPN.
The only way out I found: separate your activities / interests according to the browsers (they get info through browsers) i.e. to check ranking using one browser not related to audio browsing / site logging, and making sure to change your IP by switching to one of the VPN servers you normally don't use.

One important thing, when you are using your smartphone: the mobile Chrome Version blocks the use of extensions, but this is not the case with some browsers like yandex (you can add privacy badger, etc.). (now writing this using my smartphone with yandex).

Re. search engines, one has to be very cautious. Even Duckluckgogo is not so " clean", independent as it may look like, as it is using Microsoft's Bing.
It is indeed good for some cases to try different ones (incl. completely different ones like yandex' search engine).

In any case, I too can confirm how ASR tops the search rankings!

 

[PeteL]

Did we live through the same '90s?

What's your take on this, did you measure jitter of audio equipment in the nineties?

 

[Blumlein 88]

What's your take on this, did you measure jitter of audio equipment in the nineties?

Jitter has been and is a non-issue with digital audio in more than 98% of CD players, DVD players, and DACs since the introduction of the CD. Even fewer USB connected DACs. Pretty much no need to ever worry about it.

 

[PeteL]

Jitter has been and is a non-issue with digital audio in more than 98% of CD players, DVD players, and DACs since the introduction of the CD. Even fewer USB connected DACs. Pretty much no need to ever worry about it.

Read this article and measurments and if you tell me that these levels of measured distortions induced by Jitter don't matter and are not in audible territory, then we should probably ignore this whole site because nothing that Amir measures on modern equipment matters then. Equipment would get trashed in reviews for much less.

The Jitter Game Page 5

The last processor measured was the Bitwise Musik System Zero (reviewed in September 1992). At full scale the Zero had a smooth spectrum, with very few spikes and an overall jitter level of between 2.0 and 2.8ns. It maintained this performance until -50dBFS (worst case), where the number and...

www.stereophile.com

 

[nagster]

A 10MHz oscillator that cannot be externally synchronized is meaningless...

 

[Blumlein 88]

Read this article and measurments and if you tell me that these levels of measured distortions induced by Jitter don't matter and are not in audible territory, then we should probably ignore this whole site because nothing that Amir measures on modern equipment matters then. Equipment would get trashed in reviews for much less.

The Jitter Game Page 5

The last processor measured was the Bitwise Musik System Zero (reviewed in September 1992). At full scale the Zero had a smooth spectrum, with very few spikes and an overall jitter level of between 2.0 and 2.8ns. It maintained this performance until -50dBFS (worst case), where the number and...

www.stereophile.com

From that article you pointed to is the following table of results.

You know which ones had audible jitter? Probably the Sumo. Maybe, maybe, but likely not the Bitwise Zero. The rest of them are levels of jitter of no concern. Yes, one can find bad examples (which why I said 98% a non-problem). Back in the early days of the forum I posted a test of a cheap $40 box that took in HDMI and put out toslink and coax spdif for use with AVR lacking HDMI inputs. It had pretty bad jitter, and seems to be borderline audible in my uncontrolled listening of it. I suppose I could make some recordings with it in and out of circuit if people wanted to hear it for themselves. But how many times do we need to beat the poor dead horseflesh.

Budget DAC test: ViewHD Prosumer UltraHD HDMI 3x1 switcher

I purchased an HDMI 3 input 1 output switcher a couple weeks back. Price is just below $40. It is a ViewHD PRO 3X1. Now it switches HDMI sources obviously. It also can strip out audio in surround or stereo format via Toslink optical. In addition it has analog two channel output. So I thought...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Here is another stereophile article.

A Case of the Jitters

"How sour sweet music is / When time is broke and no proportion kept!"William Shakespeare, King Richard II, V, v, 42

www.stereophile.com

Worst measuring unfortunately was a $6000 McIntosh media server with 14 nanoseconds of jitter. Next was a Sony Playstation with 737 picoseconds of jitter (this article was looking for the worst performers mind you). That Sony likely wasn't audible.

Next is an interesting case, a Pioneer Universal player with "moderately high 457 picoseconds of jitter". I owned that one. It has a curious trait of when starting a disc or after having switched tracks it had horrendous jitter which slowly decreased over the first 15 seconds after which it was a quite clean transport. JA tested with a 30 second track so he really was averaging far more than 457 ps of jitter with not much in that final 15 seconds. Now I made test discs with test tones and music etc. and I'll be darn if I could hear the effect of the 1st 15 seconds of what probably starts off as around 5 nanoseconds of jitter. Neither could other people I let try it.

2 nanoseconds is somewhere between a hard to discern degradation to one you cannot hear with music. If your jitter is under a nanosecond I think you'll find any blinded listening will be unable to discern it.

Now you can do the usual and impugn my hearing or my equipment if you wish. I didn't in those days use the Pioneer as my primary transport I used it for movies and SACDs. My transport at the time was the Meridian they laud in the latter part of this article for having benign jitter suitable for hirez listening. So I at least had great familiarity with a lowish jitter digital source.