The AardSyncII is a master digital synchronizer for your studio. It’s definitely not one of the “glory” purchases you’ll make. It’s not like buying a Neumann M149 or dbx Quantum processor, but it’s a product that, in today’s digital studio, is crucial to how all of the digital recording equipment communicates – ultimately determining if your digital gear truly benefits your production work.
There is a lot of mysticism out there relating to jitter and clocking, and how they affect the performance of a digital studio. I won’t get too deep into the technical aspect of this, but I will give you a brief explanation of how a good clock will affect your converters and performance when you have more than one digital piece of equipment in your studio. In short, the specs mean nothing unless you know how they were measured and what that translates into in terms of actually audio quality. The way it sounds will be the “holy grail” of discussion here in relation to this product.
Draw an analogy to a digital piece of gear as a wristwatch and the clock inside it that determines when a second is a second as it’s internal clock. Every internal clock on a wristwatch varies. If we manually matched the time on our clocks to 10 AM and said to meet back here in exactly two hours we may walk through the door and almost exactly the same time. If I told you to meet me back here in exactly ten days then we may walk through minutes apart. Now let’s consider that we could connect these two devices with an infinitely long cable that would allow one watch to be master and the other a slave (given that distance would have no effect for illustrative purposes) then we would always be on the same time. The way digital audio sounds is directly related to the ability of every device to keep your audio samples completely aligned. The AardSyncII does just that. It acts as the master for every digital piece of equipment in your studio to keep everything in check and define when a sample should be aligned. The further explanation is how that will affect your sound in relation to a converter.
There are basically three main components to a converter: the analog section that steps down the voltage for the converter chip; the converter chip itself; and the clock that tells it when to take it’s samples or play them back, depending on whether you are recording or monitoring. Actually doing the math to create a binary or “digital” equivalent is fairly easy for the chip to do, but determining when that sample is taken or aligned for playback is crucial.
I’ve tested the AardSyncII clock on everything from ProTools to Apogee and even the Sony DMXR-100. All those products sounded good and had me pretty excited about what they could do for the production of an album – until I plugged in the AardsyncII. I was a little surprised at what happened to the sound for each of these products. It was hard to articulate in words at first, but after listening to the results for a period of time, I began to realize everything sounded more present; the imaging was so much wider, my ability to perceive localization in the stereo field was better. Most of the time I was using Genelec monitors, model 1030A or 1032A, in a really good room. You may not hear some of the advantages immediately – especially if you’re not using the AardSyncII in an acoustically controlled room (i.e. something to prevent the sound from bouncing everywhere). However, this is a separate discussion, and shouldn’t prevent you from using the AardSyncII – especially if you’re going to have your project mixed or mastered in a professional facility.
How does Aardvark accomplish this feat? Aardvark keeps pretty quiet about how their AardSyncII clock sounds so much better than the Lucid or some of the others out there, but it is apparent if you listen. The best explanation I’ve been able to get that makes sense is that they know enough about jitter to noise shape it out of the range where it will affect an audible signal. Whatever it is they do it speaks or should I say “sounds” for itself and will make a difference in any studio.