The primary purpose of the NADAC C’s 10 MHz reference is to reduce long-term timing variations such as wander and drift, thereby maintaining the fundamental sonic quality of the system. The [MF Advanced Clock Data Recovery System] locks onto this 10 MHz baseline and further refines it to generate the final Audio Master Clock that drives the DAC.

A useful analogy might be loudspeakers: no single speaker can perfectly cover 20 Hz to 20 kHz without compromise. Likewise, no single clock can be flawless across all performance dimensions. That’s why we use multi-stage processing to harness the strengths of different clock circuits and components, ultimately producing a clock signal as close to perfect as possible.

This multi-stage methodology is similar to practices in high-end measurement equipment—for instance, crystal oscillator phase noise analysis systems, where multiple specialized circuits are cascaded to achieve the best performance.