Sync button on Arcam Black Box - wots if for?

For reasons given in another post (Is the CD player dead?) I've got an Arcan Delta 5 Black Box Dac. I bought this off eBay without a manual. It sounds OK for my testing purposes but it has a "Sync" button on it, that when activated turns the musc into a horrible white noise hiss.

Can anyone tell me what this button does or what it's for?

There also has a button labelled "Phase". I'm less interested in this one... and think I know what it does... but why does it do it.. what is it useful for?

 

The phase button inverts absolute phase. Many early DACs had that feature (some still do). I think it came from the realisation that a lot of CDs had been recorded with absolute phase inverted. However, if you can hear the difference in absolute phase then you have better ears than I do

It's a moot point anyway as so many recordings have it "wrong" and some have it "right" on some tracks and "wrong" on others and who knows which is which?

Some people over on AudioAsylum.com seem to be on a kind of Jihad about absolute phase but I wouldn't worry about it.

No idea what the sync button does though.

Michael.

 

Sheeet. That's the bit i want to know!!!

 

Does the black box have a clock input? If so, then the sync button would presumably select between internal or external clocking (presumably slaved to a matching delta transport?). If not, no idea.

 

I agree with Isaac. Sounds like a button to switch in a "clock-link" slaving facility from an external transport. I remember Arcam had a proprietary clock link system that they use to use on their Black Box series of transport/DACs called Deltran. So therefore you'd need an appropriate Black Box series transport to make use of this facility plus an additional lead to carry the clock link signal. I think DPA/Deltec also made transports which confirmed to the Deltran standard IIRC. Not sure if there are any other Deltran capable transports around...

HTH

 

The Sync button is to select to use or not the optical clock link on the rear of the Dac (labelled IIRC Sync lock). As Henry's said this is to link the clock of an appropriate Arcam transport directly to the DAC, in theory to remove/reduce jitter. I used to have a Black Box 50 (well, actually an upgraded 5) which I used with my Delta 250 transport which had such a clock link. In all honesty though, with my humble ears and system, I couldn't tell any difference whether this link was selected or not .

Martin