jaffacake;299720 Wrote: 
> So does that mean that one player will play faster than the other and be
> slightly different from the original source?
> 
> Would the clock be more accurate in, for example, Transporter hardware
> where owners might expect a more accurate reproduction of the source?

The crystals in SB3 are specified to within 50ppm accuracy, so if you
take the worst case where one is fast by 50ppm and the other is slow by
50ppm, then you have a total drift between the two of 100ppm or
0.000100. After one hour, the faster player would be ahead by 0.000100
hours == 360 milliseconds, which is easily audible. In reality I don't
think you would ever find crystals as bad as that, but it's easy to see
how even at +/- 10ppm, correction for clock drift is still required. I
would estimate the threshold of audibility for the casual listener to
be about 50ms.

As an approximate rule of thumb 1ms is equal to 1 foot at the speed of
sound. Typically there is some distance between the two rooms so you
would add that to the drift that is perceived. 

Certainly Transporter has a better clock but it is hard to estimate
exactly by how much two Transporters might drift slower than two
squeezeboxes. It's a manufacturing tolerance issue so you can't really
characterize it without comparing LOTS of units. In any case, a design
which depends on two crystals having exactly the same frequency is
simply broken as this is never achievable in practice. Even two
perfectly identically manufactured crystals will not behave the same in
a real world setting because they will be operating at different
temperatures, and this affects the speed too.

I am not entirely up to speed on all of the improvements that Alan has
made but my most recent understanding is that we still resync on track
boundaries. This is not an unreasonable approach, but it's not ideal
either because it inherently makes it impossible to do gapless playback
while synced. To do that we would need to implement a gradual correction
scheme where clock drift is corrected over a relatively long period of
time.


-- 
seanadams
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