Yep, I can. I have one in my Sony CDP X77ES. Great player to begin with and made considerably better with the addition of this clock.
I don't have a seperate PS but my CDP has seperate PS for analog and digital anyway.
A description of my adventures at the time: (copied from HD, rather than linked as I am not sure how long HD will be around.) Link:
http://www.harmonicdiscord.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5053&highlight=Below are my experiences with upgrading the internal clock in my Sony CDP X77ES with a "Tent Clock".
I received the clock by mail last week. Neatly packed in a bit of styrofoam and shipped in a bubble padded envelope. Even though it is a bit of a DIY operation, the PCB, installations etc. all look completely professional. All markings are screened onto the PCB etc. Soldering visually very neat.
I decided to try the installation on Tuesday night. I first reread the Tent installation instructions. As these were a bit generic I also looked at the installation instructions for some other brands of after-market clocks. The one from LCAudio's German dealer was the best as most specific.
Armed with all this information it was easy to find the oscillator and associated R/C circuit. Poking around with a multimeter it was also not too difficult to find a nice 10V source.
What was difficult was finding a place to put the little board. (print is about a large as a creditcard). I ended up removing the balanced line-stage to create the space. I don't expect this to be typical as most CDP have quite a bit of free space inside the cabinet.
I then started taking apart the player as there are quite a few circuit boards in the player. And all of them are connected with multiple cables to something else. I must have disconnected 15 cables or so and then I still left most of them in place.
Now I could get at the underside of the analog board to desolder the original parts. (funny place to put the oscillator and servo controller)
Desoldering 1 R and 2 Cs was more difficult than it should be because my solder sucker/desoldering pump broke.
Next step is the actual connection of the clock-output. The idea is to connect the signal cable to the input of the servo controller and the return to a ground point close to that. I could not fit the cable into the little holes so I ended up soldering directly onto the traces that were nice and wide at this point.
I then mounted the clock-card in place of the line-card I removed. I had to use tie-wraps as the card was too short to fit in the same place exactly. It ended up hanging like a hammock between two trees with stability provided by the width of the tie-wraps and the signal and power-wires.
I soldered the power-leads onto the wire-wrap posts that carried the 10V I found. Easy to get a good connection.
Put the basic parts together to test: cable in, power on, PSU click, nothing else. Hmmm.
By this time it was way past midnight so I went to bed. You can understand that I was maybe not completely happy with myself and the situation.
Yesterday-evening: Second try.
First repeated my testing steps. (Would not be the first time that something just starts working overnight....) But nothing.
Then measured my PSU voltage to see if it did not sag drastically with the load of the clock. No, I measured 10.74V compared to 10.78V Tuesday.
Next plan was to solder the original circuit back in place to see if I could make it work in the original configuration and hadn't broken something else.
So I unsoldered the leads from the PSU. Flip over the machine to get at the analog board and notice that the power-lead has become disconnected from the clock board at the board. Shoddy soldering, too much stress, gremlins?? Who knows? Anyway, soldering this on took quite some time as my sucky solder sucker had completely given up the ghost by then.
Remounted the board same as the day before and resoldered the power-connection.
Flip the CDP right side up, powercable in, power on, click, nice 0 (zero) on the display and all seems well. Put a disc in, press play and it runs. Great!!
So after putting all side/bottom/top panels on and putting in about 300 little phillips-head screws I had a whole CDP again.
Put it back into the system, loaded Coltrane and later Rachmaninoff and listened. (Yes, it really did work again!)
What follows is of course subjective. Not only did I not listen to it for 2 days, I also was tremendously relieved that I did not break anything permanently.
With the above disclaimer, I still feel that there has been a significant improvement overall. My best reason for feeling that is that I found details in several parts of the CDs I listened to that I could not remember having heard before.
Is it worth it?
- Imaging is very solid and stable. Instruments and players had a tendency to float back and forth a bit before.
- Depth of soundstage has not really changed but I attribute my flat soundstage to my very live room. I have done some experiments with pillows to deaden the wall behind my speakers and this improves things a great deal.
- Transparency is better. When listening to well-recorded music, it is now much easier to listen to smaller aspects in the whole presentation. Small stuff in the background is easy to follow as the sound is clearly different than music on the foreground. (listening to cymbals "tings" while the sax is doing some complex stuff for example.)
- It seems that bass is tighter but this may be a function of better transparency.
- Without being able to A/B, it's hard to say for certain but it also seems that there is less general noise. I don't mean hiss but every sound seems to come with noise of some sort (distortion, artifacts, harmonics??) and this is now much less. Maybe this is also the explanation for the transparency.
- The last thing that in noticed is that instruments sound more natural. To me this is especially noticable on strings, including piano.
In the end, what is involved in replacing a clock:
- Finding the right clock (There are quite a few to choose from: Audiocom, LCAudio, Kwak-klok, Tent XO, Trichord)
- Opening CDP; finding power and the correct location to connect the clock-signal.
- Finding a place to mount the clock. Very hard in my Sony, should be quite easy in most players. The main limitation is that the clock signal cable cannot be longer than 10cm.
- Desoldering and soldering. If you do it right first time and have all tools working, this should not be too much of a problem. It's only 4 connections.
