Clock, Sync, Latency, and Jitter

It does help to keep things in perspective.

Every incremental gain can be a hard-fought engineering accomplishment, and it’s worth discussing. Those of us in engineering can enjoy squeezing out every last ounce of performance.

But we can also get carried away presenting those achievements as practical benefits. A smaller number on the test bench doesn’t automatically translate into a meaningful improvement for the musician.

MIDI Clock still has to be transmitted and processed by the receiving instrument, whose handling of those messages is also a factor in the resulting musical timing. A 33-microsecond figure at the source, by itself, doesn’t indicate how much better your musical experience will be. It’s one small measure of engineering performance.

The practical question always comes back to whether you actually hear timing instability or have synchronization problems. And whether you like the setup and convenience of your workflow. If you have those problems, or you have those inconveniences, any Master Clock you add that solves them is the best thing ever for you, no matter what claims we make about a handful of microseconds.

1 Like