Antelope Audio Preamps Go Nuclear With Atomic Clock

The old joke with consumer electronics used to be that you didn’t make anything new, you just took something old and shoved a digital clock into it. Antelope Audio went a few steps past that with their new Rubicon preamp — it has a 10M Rubidium atomic clock. To paraphrase Marty McFly, “This sucker’s nuclear.”

The atomic clock isn’t so much for timekeeping purposes, as it is 100,000 times more stable than a traditional crystal oscillator. In layman’s terms, it makes your 128 kbps MP3 of MC Hammer’s “Too Legit to Quit” sound really, really good. It also has 384 kHz DAC, ultra-high sample rate A/D conversion, and 384 kHz USB streaming. Don’t go running out to Best Buy to pick up your Rubicon just quite yet, the preamp makes its debut at The High End Show in Munich, Germany on May 3.