Mutec MC-3+ USB

[SwissBear]

How about enabling digital out on the Devialet and connect this back to the Mutec as clock reference, but still use the superior clocking in the Mutec? Would this work?

Not sure, but what I understand from this complicated matter, is that you need to have a very precise clock in order to improve the quality of the signal (remove jitter and noise). You might be able to use the digital output of the Devialet and feed it into the Mutec (MC-3+ USB) as external clock, but you will then not benefit from any 10 MHz clock input (you can only have one master clock).

Yes, that is my understanding too.
What I would like is that instead of Devialet just extracting the clock from the AES signal coming from the Mutec, the two clock domains is syncronised avoiding drift between the units. The Mutec should know the clock frequency at the DAC in the Devialet and adjust accordingly while still using it's own reference clock, internal or external. I guess either Mutec or Devialet will have to program something to make this work. Maybe both.

Well, I don't quite understant why you would like the Mutec to take care of the Devialet.

In case of a simple configuration, you have the Mutec MC-3+ USB which job is just to correct the jittering of the signal and send it to the Devialet. There is no Master Clock involved here. This is the configuration I have, and the MC-3 uses its own internal clock to do the job.

In the more sophisticated configuration we are contemplating, there is an additional Mutec box, REF10 for 10 MHz clock, which serves as the master clock for all the devices connected through S-P/DIF or AES, and which need to be synchronized. The Ref10 delivers its master clock signal through a coax to the MC-3s which are in charge of de-jittering.

If the Devialet's DAC was able to accept an external clock signal, this would be awesome. But this is not the case. So the Devialet will synchronize to it's input signal, which is already quite clean as this is, for the clock part, the clock signal coming from the Ref10, which has been altered going through the last MC-3. I say last because you can chain multiple devices.

Are we on the same page ?

But once again, we need to listen to such a system to assess that it produces better SQ. So far, tests made by our German colleagues with their homemade 10 MHz clocks do not seem to exceed the SQ produced by two MC-3+ USB stacked. We will need to wait for the Ref10 to be on the market and check...