Of these, LTC, Midi Sync, Superclock, Word Clock, and MTC are the most commonly used with audio today. Since VITC is used for syncing up video signals, I won't be covering it here. Suffice it to say that VITC can be converted to most of these other signals by a converter box, and then integrated with your audio systems. In understanding how each of these signals work and how to use them within your system, I would like to focus first on LTC and the information that it carries, as it will help to explain the other signals in the next article. LTC is a squarewave audio signal that, when visualized on a display of some kind, will show hours, minutes, seconds and frames to give a specific positional reference.
Frames represent one second split into a certain number of parts, depending on the frame rate.
The frame rate for audio by itself is 30 frames per second, but if you were working with video or film and trying to sync it up with audio information, you would have to change the frame rate. As you will see later, not every sync signal has both positional and clock reference, but they will always have at least one of the two. I stated earlier that linear timecode is an audio signal, which means that it will be laid back onto tape along with the rest of your song tracks. One thing to keep in mind about timecode is that it works great at normal playback speeds and faster, but it is not recommended for use with video when shuttling tape back and forth, since it works bad at slow speeds. The timecode signal must be created from a generator of some type, which may be a separate generator box, or maybe you have a software program that can generate timecode and send it out to be recorded onto tape.