But there's more: The Absolute Time comes with a housing milled from a block of aluminum and the toroidal transformer for the power supply is much larger. The rectification is carried out with an active bridge rectifier circuit, which completely dispenses with the usual diodes and is thus intended to largely eliminate diode-rectifier noise. The filter capacities are much more generous and the ELNA Silmic II types with low ESR values, which are well reputed in audiophile circles, are used as filtering capacitors throughout. On the USB input, we also find a proprietary three-stage noise reduction circuit. For the clock oscillator, a much higher quality specimen is used. In addition, the Absolute Time features a fully separated S/PDIF branch with a standalone ultra-low-noise, jitter-free re-clocking platform and a 12 megahertz master clock output for external digital signal sources. This is also intended to help owners of CD players to achieve optimized performance. There is no signal conversion between USB and S/PDIF; so it is not possible to enter the re-clocker via USB and go out again via S/PDIF. The modules for the USB and S/PDIF branch are pluggable, so that upgrades at a later date should be possible without any problems.

And if the ratio of effort and benefit no longer plays a role, then you end up with the top model Absolute Time Signature. Here, two complete Absolute Time USB modules are cascaded. At the same time, the effort for the power supply is taken to the extreme: two toroidal transformers, almost doubling the filtering capacities and in the second stage of voltage stabilization, one of the already lowest-noise voltage regulators available is used in a parallel configuration to reduce the noise even further. The whole thing is packaged in a 22 kilogram (!) case that is twice as deep as the Absolute Time, which makes the Absolute Time look like its smaller brother. For the listening test, I choose a notebook that runs an installation of Windows Server 2019 optimized with AudiophileOptimizer 3.0 and uses JRiver 24 as a media player. There are no other tuning measures, except that I always run the notebook on battery power when listening to music. From the USB output of the notebook it goes to one of the Ideon Re-Clocker models and from there to my PS Audio DirectStream DAC.