RME Audio MADIface XT, User Manual

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User's Guide MADIface XT
© RME
103
30.8 SteadyClock
The SteadyClock technology of the MADIface XT guarantees an excellent performance in all
clock modes. Its highly efficient jitter suppression refreshes and cleans up any clock signal, and
provides it as reference clock at the word clock output.
Usually a clock section consists of an analog PLL for external synchronization and several
quartz oscillators for internal synchronisation. SteadyClock requires only one quartz, using a
frequency not equalling digital audio. Latest circuit designs like hi-speed digital synthesizer,
digital PLL, 100 MHz sample rate and analog filtering allow RME to realize a completely newly
developed clock technology, right within the FPGA at lowest costs. The clock's performance
exceeds even professional expectations. Despite its remarkable features, SteadyClock reacts
quite fast compared to other techniques. It locks in fractions of a second to the input signal,
follows even extreme varipitch changes with phase accuracy, and locks directly within a range
of 25 kHz up to 200 kHz.
SteadyClock has originally been de-
veloped to gain a stable and clean
clock from the heavily jittery MADI data
signal. The embedded MADI clock
suffers from about 80 ns jitter, caused
by the time resolution of 125 MHz
within the format. Common jitter values
for other devices are 5 ns, while a very
good clock will have less than 2 ns.
The picture to the right shows the
MADI input signal with 80 ns of jitter
(top graph, yellow). Thanks to
SteadyClock this signal turns into a
clock with less than 2 ns jitter (lower
graph, blue).
The other input sources of the
MADIface XT, word clock and AES,
gain a lot from SteadyClock as well. In
fact, extracting a low jitter clock from
LTC is not possible without a Steady-
Clock similar technique at all!
The screenshot to the right shows an
extremely jittery word clock signal of
about 50 ns jitter (top graph, yellow).
Again SteadyClock provides an ex-
treme clean-up. The filtered clock
shows less than 2 ns jitter (lower
graph, blue).
The cleaned and jitter-freed signal can be used as reference clock for any application, without
any problem. The signal processed by SteadyClock is of course not only used internally, but
also available at all outputs.