Post by Dan on Nov 22, 2024 0:02:20 GMT -6
Not really a lot of in-between anymore, which is a bit depressing. You've got some outliers like JCF, but the workflow and integration is pretty inconvenient. Quite expensive as well. I remember really liking the first generation silverface Apollo's quite a bit, they sounded musical and had the same pedigree as the 2192. The blackface ones came out and I hated them, gladly stuck with the Silverfaces. The X series came out and although I still didn't think they sounded anywhere close to musical, they were clearly more accurate and exposed a lot of harshness issues I was having in the top end.
I've felt like for the last 5 years, we've hit the law of diminishing returns with converters. They all sound pretty much the same to me, they all sound really good. I can hear differences when I occasionally get the chance to compare, but the differences I hear don't really matter enough to me to have a strong opinion. A lot of people were either not around in the really early 2000's or have just forgotten how much of a difference there was between something like an M-Box and a nicer rack unit. MASSIVE difference, and companies like Black Lion really helped the little guys like me afford something that was professional and useable. Everything sounds technically good now, I wish a company would pop up that focused on (affordable) mojo and tone for their converters and making something musical as oppose to touting the same worthless stats everyone else does.
UA would be the perfect people to pick up the mantle and revive something like the 2192, but they're not that company any more. We get the "Vibe" button on the Volt interfaces now. I think the closest thing we still have (that sounds great and was WAY before it's time) is Heat in ProTools. Still a solid choice, I was playing around with it a few days ago and was surprised how great it sounded.
there are still a ton of poor converters with poor clocks, poor anti-alias filters (especially at 44.1 kHz), poor current to voltage conversion (sometimes on chip), and poor analog design with noticeable distortion. not everyone is current apogee, dangerous, lavry, lynx, or weiss.
the reason many are starting to sound similar is that the akm fire made a ton of manufacturers switch to ess sabre chipsets and these manufacturers are simply cheaping out the test designs. there is no way to make a ti/bb hybrid resistor converter sound exactly like them but even then, they sound different between each other, eg an rme is world's away from an apogee symphony which doesn't sound like the weiss converters with clean discrete opamps. have you heard the weiss converters? they might be the closest to something like burl with a focus on clean. they're mega expensive like all weiss hardware though, this time focusing on the cost no object hifi market.
the other thing is many of these converters use the chips' built in filters with inadequate band rejection at 44.1 kHz. computationally cheap half band filters can sound noticeably different at 44.1 kHz versus 48 kHz with the material resampled with a conventional brickwall filter to reject aliasing.