A Confused streaming system - Mutec / SOtM Ultra

[Confused]

Doing the armchair audio designer bit, I could see that the MC3+USB has an advantage, as it is feeding the Devialet a REF10'd super low jitter signal to the AES/EBU input which the Devialet could take full advantage of when extracting the clock signal.  

@Confused are you sure the Devialet uses the clock signal that comes with the AES signal? With all the DSP things going on in there I think they buffer/re-clock the signal with the internal clock but this is pure speculation from my side

No, I am not sure at all!  It would be normal with S/PDIF for the receiving device use a phased locked loop to match the clock signal of the incoming stream, but I have no idea exactly how this is implemented in a Devialet.  I asked Mathieu Pernot about this at a Devialet event once, I got a very detailed explanation about the differences between synchronous and asynchronous protocols, but I did not glean any secrets of the inner workings of a Devialet.  Thinking about buffering / "reclocking", yes, the Devialet upsaples to 24/192, and the ADH runs at 32 bit I think, so there must be some clever stuff going on, but if there is a buffer, this needs to be emptied at precisely the rate that the source fills it, so the clocks do need to match.

What I did gain with the little test yesterday is an understanding of how the differences between synchronous and asynchronous protocols actually sound like, with my system and my ears.  So on a subjective level I know all I need to know, objectively, I am guessing.