Empirical Audio Pace-Car 2 Reclocker

The Pace-Car 2 is a high-performance reclocker that can be used with virtually any digital source device, including CD Transports, iPod, Apple TV, Sonos, Squeezebox, Duet, Olive, Transporter, PCI cards like Lynx, direct from Mac-Mini, Macbook and many others. It reduces the jitter, or timing inaccuracies, in the datastream.

It is this jitter that makes digital audio sound “veiled” or fatigueing. Once it is eliminated, the result is like cleaning the film from a window, improving clarity, dynamics and 3-D as well as bass tightness.

The Pace-Car was primarily designed to address the deficiencies in the various WiFi devices on the market, but has much wider application, even extending to multi-channel synchronous streams to support computer-generated speaker crossover software.

The Pace-Car is legendary for reducing jitter to extremely low levels in digital music streams. Two audio magazine editors use the Pace-Car or Pace-Car 2 for their digital audio reference: Positive-Feedback and Stereo Times. Positive-Feedback did a comparison of several USB converters and the Pace-Car:

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue39/ramblings_computer.htm

The Pace-Car 2 improves on the original Pace-Car with new discrete and separate power regulation and improved grounding to further isolate the inputs from the outputs. A small switching supply has been replaced with a linear for lower noise.

The Pace-Car 2 is a buffer-memory device that temporarily stores the digital data stream in order to reclock it out using a local clock with very low jitter. The jitter on the inputs is not particularly important. The data is not modified in any way.

There are three modes in which the Pace-Car can be used:
1) word-clock synchronous
2) master-clock synchronous
3) asynchronous tuned

Depending on the source device, one of these modes will be used.

The Pace-Car 2 supports 44.1kHz and 96kHz sample rates as standard (provided the clocks are present), with 88.2, 176.4 and 192 as optional.

Standard Inputs:
Toslink
S/PDIF coax

Standard outputs:
S/PDIF coax
Empirical Audio I2S
Word-clocks on one output
Master-clocks on two outputs

Included
Pace-Car 2
AC power supply
Toslink cable if applicable
word-clock cable if applicable
master-clock cable if applicable

Options
First Superclock4
Second Superclock4
First tuned Superclock4
Second tuned Superclock4
AES/EBU output jack in place of S/PDIF coax
NextGen output jack
Canare BNC output jack

Pricing
Pace-Car 2 $1200.00
Pace-Car 2 with one Superclock4 $1500.00
http://www.empiricalaudio.com