Inquiry about the 'Externally clocked' setting

[cubic13]

@MrSoundman

I know this is not the answer you would like to hear, and I’m aware of the advice given sometimes to make the A/D converter the master (and what do you do if you have more than one A/D device?), but I have always had my RME RayDAT set as master and all connected ADAT and S/PDIF devices as slaves.

I would not want the RayDAT to be clocked externally unless I could see (hear!) a measurable improvement, and so far, the opposite has been the case. In my case, the RayDAT is the best clock in the system, and that’s why I’ve configured it to be master, which in addition simplifies operation.

I’m to hear anything, actually. And I note what you are saying : as I previously said, I more or less had the same feeling since a long time, even if nothing was truely supporting it. So, I’ll probably modify my whole setup as you and @mkok are suggesting, one day or another. But still, it doesn’t answer my initial question : in which case the Externally clocked setting has to be used and how comes that, when ticked, the Clock Source one is greyed out (a ‘Word clock only’ setting, maybe…) ? The manual is useless, on the subject.

@MrSoundman

Have you tested making the Fireface master to see if the issue with 128 sample buffer goes away?

Just did (with the TosLink cable connections swapped and after adjusting both the ADA-8200 SYNC selector and the Clock Source setting in the UCX control panel, before relaunching Cubase). Result as shown :

The issue remains the same : an Audio processing Load = 0 with no audio of any kind available from Cubase…