Black Lion Audio

[andygriffiths]

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone is using any of there products? More so the interface mods. Just wondering if the mods are worth it & wether the word clock is any good. Any help would be great before I drop some cash on there products.

Peace

[Alistair]

The external MicroClock is good. Fixed all problems I had with using 3 separate converters, and made a noticeable difference to the high end response of my cheaper converters. Now I have a Lynx Aurora I don't use it at all.

Now I've got the Lynx I don't need it any more and I'm looking to sell, so if you're keen let me know. It's great, compact and easy to use- but the downside is that the cables plug into the same side as the controls are, so it can be a bit messy in the rack.
I assume the internal mods use the same clock?

[zenelectro]

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone is using any of there products? More so the interface mods. Just wondering if the mods are worth it & wether the word clock is any good. Any help would be great before I drop some cash on there products.

Peace

A few years ago one of my clients had BL modded Motu 2408 and asked if I could do similar to another 2408 he had bought. The combined cost of shipping / mods pushed the BL over his threshold.

One of the big issues with these upgrade jobs is that you are working on a 'low cost' foundation and trying to upgrade it. Everywhere you look in the design, that low cost will be prevalent.

I did the 2408 at a reasonable cost and it turned out sonically very similar to the BL, so the client was happy. I have subsequently knocked a lot of other work though, because I just don't think in most cases it's good value trying to upgrade cheaper stuff. To do the job properly you really have to go through the whole thing and chuck out 90% of what is there, including the PS, and then you can't re do the pcb.

WRT the BL clock, it is very good and has very good phase noise (jitter) specs but the individual results will vary depending on the converters internal WC processing.

One misconception amongst audio engineers is that when you run off external WC, your converters are clocked
directly off this WC. Not so. Your converters will be running off internal 22.5792 MHz / 24.576MHz clocks. When you lock to external WC, you are still using internal clocks but they are just being 'adjusted' or 'pulled' to the ext WC. You can look at it like the internal clock is a big 22MHz flywheel being slowly adjusted by the ext WC to stay in sync.

As such, the external WC doesn't lower the jitter of your internal clock except at very low frequencies. However
LF jitter has proven to be important so this is why you can actually sometimes hear an improvement in the
sound.

Generally, use your best converter on internal clock and slave other stuff to it's WC OP. If your converter sounds significantly better slaved off BL WC, you might want to consider a better converter.

FWIW, I build super low jitter (much less than 1 pico second) clocks for hi-end clients. It started as just a fun
project to see if a super low phase noise oscillator, like something that would be used in a GPS base station, would make any difference. It turns out does and I have people chasing me to get more of these made (the oscillators have to be custom made to very tight spec).

One thing I'm interested to try is one of these super low phase noise oscillator on an AD converter and see what effect they have on the front end.

cheers

Terry