Despite its huge importance to quality of digital sound, the role of the digital word clock is often hidden from the view of the novice project studio builder. In very short, this is because inexpensive I/O cards or interfaces of the kind found in starter project studios have their word clock as a chipset that is bunched in with the rest of the on-board circuitry (such as AD/DA converters, mixing firmware, what have you.) In fact, a built-in (and therefore inferior) word clock is the hallmark of starter or even some low-mid-level gear: when you start seeing cards or interfaces that can take external clock, you aren't seeing the low-priced cards.

The clock's role is beyond critical: the clock tells the converters exactly how often to sample or desample audio. You might think this is already implied: 44.1 thousand times a second is 44.1 thousand times a second, right? No. Not even close. The converters need a signal that ticks along at very tight precision in order to pass the audio without "haziness" or "smeariness" or "brittleness" (all terms that apply to the digital audio that cheap interfaces produce.)

A full discussion of clock and jitter and subtle to obvious marring of audio due to inferior clock is beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless the industry has for a long time offered a solution to the problem of inferior clocks: long story short, you can buy standalone clocks and connect them to the interfaces and hear your audio improve immediately.

One of the big problems with clocks from a manufacturing standpoint is that most clock makers are stuck with building in little-used features in their products that raise the price and complexity of these standalone clocks. Enter Black Lion Audio of Chicago with their new stripped-down Microclock box.

Black Lion are a shop specializing in modifying modestly priced audio I/Os (M-Audio Delta 1010 and Digi 002 come to mind) by improving the analog and digital stages of these devices. It was only a matter of time until they would roll out a standalone clock and it happened last week. The price is reasonable and the benefits are pretty clear - check out the Microclock at Black Lion Audio.