PUCCINI

The Puccini range features the award-winning Puccini U-Clock which is a separate Grade 1 system clock to further reduce jitter and improve performance. Matched with the Puccini Player it improves on an already spectacular sound and takes it into an entirely new domain. With the clock added, images snap into sharper focus and the music displays a substantially greater sense of authority and power as well as offering noticeably higher resolution of detail.

Puccini U-Clock also features a USB-to-S/PDIF converter, which lets owners play high resolution audio from a computer through the legendary dCS Ring DAC™ inside the Puccini.

dCS equipment is designed to generate and accept industry-standard Word Clock on 75 ohm coaxial cable. dCS Clocks will drive other manufacturers’ equipment designed to accept standard Word Clock. Non-standard clock formats must be assumed to be proprietary to that manufacturer.

USB has numerous modes for synchronising the audio between a host computer and an audio device such as a DAC. ‘Adaptive’ is the most popular of these, and involves the audio device synchronising itself to the USB ‘frame’ provided by the computer. However, this tends to give poor jitter performance so Puccini U-Clock operates in asynchronous mode, where the audio device synchronises the audio by providing a feedback pipe to the computer. The computer is effectively locked to the audio device, which then benefits from a much more accurate clock for dramatically lower jitter. USB is isochronous, which means that the host (PC) and client (Puccini U-Clock) both know how much bandwidth is available at the outset, so the host can guarantee that bandwidth will be available all the time.

Music files may be stored on an external Hard Disc Drive (HDD) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) in a different room, networked to a small, silent Mac or PC connected by USB cable to the Puccini U-Clock. When the user selects the audio for playback, the computer streams music from the HDD or NAS device, then outputs the data via USB.