Well Connected
In addition to carefully executed, galvanically isolated digital inputs (three 75 Ohm BNC and one 110 Ohm XLR) to minimise jitter and noise, Gryphon Kalliope is also fitted with a 110 Ohm XLR digital output which makes the de-jittered signal from the selected input available to other equipment.
Gryphon Kalliope eliminates phono plug S/PDIF connections, because the BNC connector is the only way to ensure a true 75 Ohm impedance for optimal data transfer.
For increasingly popular computer music sources, Gryphon Kalliope incorporates a state of the art, bit-perfect, asynchronous and galvanically isolated USB input, capable of full 32-bit/384 kHz data transmission. Because Kalliope is a native Class Two USB device, simple installation of appropriate drivers is necessary for PC users. Drivers are pre-installed on Macs.
Music playback via conventional synchronous USB is a one-way connection that uses the computer’s bus frame rate as its clock source, resulting in highly unstable timing. Adaptive USB is marginally better, as it allows the receiver chip to adapt to the drifting signal by constantly adjusting its own frequency. However, both methods introduce substantial levels of jitter.
With asynchronous USB transfer mode (unrelated to asynchronous sample rate conversion), the Gryphon Kalliope master clock is not synchronized to a clock in the computer. Instead, the Kalliope’s high-precision internal clock controls the data stream from the computer to a buffer near the DAC, eliminating a major source of timing errors.
Input signals sync to one of two clocks depending on the signal’s sample frequency, a 22.5792 MHz clock for multiples of 44.1 kHz and a 24.5760 MHz clock for multiples of 48 kHz. Operating at true multiples of the signal’s original sampling frequency ensures far more accurate timing.
While Gryphon Kalliope is fitted with a 75 Ohm BNC connector for optional synchronisation via an external word clock signal, the Kalliope’s internal, independent, specially designed, temperature-compensated crystal oscillators with accuracy better than 5 parts per million address crucial timing issues so effectively that its superb clock-extraction circuitry removes all traces of clock jitter and other clocking artefacts.
