PrimaLuna USA pmn manual SuperTubeClock

PrimaLuna© ProLogue Eight

The SuperTubeClock

This is where the magic happens... the SuperTjoebClock replaces the solid state oscillator normally found in a CD player’s digital clocking device with a mini triode vacuum tube. When you reclock a cd-drive, any noise that is generated here appears unfiltered and unattenuated at the input of the decoder chip in the cd-player and injects jitter, which from then on is an undistinguishable part of the digital audio stream. No amount of cleaning will ever be able to remove this noise once it reaches this point; it has become part of the audio signal. There is a distinctive loss of dynamics, tonal purity, intertransient silence, and sense of timing. We call this “noise modulation.”

When the clock is used to clock the DAC chip, a similar situation occurs as described above: the noise appears at the location where the digital audio stream is converted to successive steps in a staircase wave, which represents the analog audio signal. Each step has to be EXACTLY 1/441000th, 1/96000th, 1/176400th, or 1/192000th (depending on whether there’s oversampling or upsampling, CD or DVD). The injected noise introduces a deviation in time which is the exact replica of that noise. This means that the audio signal at the outputs of the DAC chip has the noise riding on it, again as an inherent part of the signal. No amount of filtering will remove the noise once it reaches this step. Again we experience that smear and detail masking, with that distinctive loss of dynamics, tonal purity, intertransient silence, and sense of timing.

By replacing the standard solid state oscillator with a tube, we have significantly lowered the amount of jitter and noise, resulting in superior detail retreival. This in turn yields superior detail and dynamics from top to bottom, and improved overrall musicality.

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