For your amusement... Sitting in a waiting room yesterday, I read an article in a very-high-end audio magazine describing a $15K Rubidium frequency standard for providing low jitter clocks to your audio system. It has outputs at 44.1, 48, etc. kHz, as well as a 100kHz, which the person writing said might become a new standard (huh?)
Aside from the usual blather about how the improved clock jitter made this album or that more open sounding and improved the auditory experience, there were the usual gold plated connectors, etc. Hey... here's a golden opportunity for a time nut. I suspect they generate the various clocks using (gasp) digital dividers and such. Now's your chance to design an incredibly complex all analog synthesis chain with step recovery diodes, mix and add, etc. Everyone knows that for the finest in audio, an all analog (preferably all Class A) design is essential. Make sure that you have at least one vacuum tube in the design, preferably two, that can be "hand selected" and mounted so there's a little window to see the glow, and have some nice analog meters to monitor some useless parameter (suppressor grid voltage or something) I don't know where they get Rubidium, but maybe you could market a concept of terroir (as for wine).. why, the Mark 3000 Rubidium reference source uses Rb extracted only from the finest hand selected ores from Canada, where they have been mined by miners with multiple generations of experience, using trucks fueled with, etc... Or following on the more recent discussions on the list about Cs and NH3 references, maybe you can one-up the Rb maker with a Cs. Or maybe GPS disciplined clock sources (you know... if the 44.1kHz sample stream coming off the CD isn't precisely aligned on the second, sonic quality is definitely impaired.. the only real question is whether you should have a means of adjusting the clock rates to accommodate small changes in the earth's rotation or relativistic effects. A whole magazine, 100 pages long, filled with this sort of thing (and yes, they had the special speaker cables with the arrows to indicate preferred direction of power flow, too....) Jim _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
