On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 03:50:04PM +0200, Clemens Ladisch wrote:
John Rigg wrote:
On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 10:07:05AM +0200, Ludovico Verducci wrote:
As far as I know the delta family boards drivers support the synchronization of up to 4 audio boards over PCI: at the moment I'm reverse engineering the hardware trying to understand how this can be accomplished.
I'm aware that some Windows users are using several Delta 1010s without external sync, but I'm not sure how it is done (or how good it sounds). AFAIK it would require a VCXO so that the frequency of the card's clock could be varied by enough to keep it in sync (ie. making the clock oscillator part of a phase locked loop). Looking at the PCI card on the 1010, I can only see standard fixed-frequency crystals. The only PLLs appear to be the internal PLL in the S/PDIF receiver and the 4046 PLL chip for the word clock input signal.
In theory, it should be possible to use the PCI clock (between 25 and 33 MHz) as input for one of the PLLs, probably after dividing it down.
AFAICT neither of these PLLs can receive an input from the PCI clock. The S/PDIF receiver only receives a signal from the S/PDIF input, and the word clock PLL only receives a signal from the WC input in the breakout box (via a pulse shaping circuit to clean up the waveform).
Apart from that, neither of these PLLs is particularly good at removing jitter (and I'd expect the PCI clock to have a high level of jitter), so quality would be reduced.
John