Lynx Aurora (n)

@soriantis I also keep forgetting who you are and that I sort of "know" you lol

Quit changing your damn user name!

Heheh it's ol' ShadowAMD aka soriantis aka (apparently) Zarconis

All good, the converters are in their particular circuit , as well, so we hear the whole box in that sense.

Completely agree about the diminishing returns. I feel I am there now with Aurora N and that a significant improvement would cost me money I don’t want to spend.

I think if you had an X, a symphony mkii, the motu and the N all there and on a controller, you would hear differences. I haven’t used motu but Wiz here, moved from motu to X.

I ended up with the N as you know, but it sounds like you have an excellent system that you know well, maybe staying put is best ?

Resistance is futile!

It's all good, I think these discussions spark conversations outside the box and challenge some notions. Also it's a nice change from my usual what channel strip or microphone should I buy thread (which I seem to post every couple of years).

It's too easy to become weighed down in the upgrade cycle path trying to find incremental improvements, in the end this thread has convinced me to stick with the Apollo for now at least. I've no doubt its capacity for good sounding tracks is far higher than my abilities anyway..

Can't wait to hear some awesome tracks cut from these Aurora's..

We’re you not here for multiple years?

It's easier to be critical about converters that are in the low to middling performance range, which there are a lot of, even in 2021. Once you get into Apollo X, Lynx N, higher end MOTU and so on, it does get a bit like splitting hairs. Just to add the point that the things being discussed in this thread are at the top of the mountain already. Compare a Lynx N to an Audient iD22 or something like that, it will be really obvious. To be really simple about it, the distortion and noise in an older converter, or many newer low-test ones, will be higher in level, more audible. Once we get into these near-24 bit dynamic ranges, the differences to get to be like tasting different glasses of water. And, somehow, the Apollos, even testing well, seem to have more of a "sound" than some of the other high testers. This is what a lot of people choose to get away from, including myself, with the Apollos. Although, no, they don't sound bad. I don't think anyone has said you can't work on almost anything, and you certainly can. Yet somehow that doesn't stop us chasing "perfection." Like jmoose said (I paraphrase, interpret) this is probably all folly if your goal is to impress a music fan, but I think that's beside the point of enjoying your craft and having not even a sliver of doubt in your equipment and the all important monitor path. I don't think anyone would argue with Bob Ludwig's "magic wires" and 120V DC dark to daylight headroom mastering console and so on at this point, or maybe they would.

One thing I've found in my REW electrical measurements is that frequency and harmonic distortion response varies a bit between various AD/DA. I'll give an example, my Clarett is nearly perfectly flat in the audible range. My UH7000 dips by about a half decibel at the highest and lowest audible frequencies. I hear the clarett as having a very punchy sound, which may or may not come from the super linear bass and treble response. I haven't measured slew rate or transient response on these. I believe these sorts of differences are something a mastering engineer would hear, and maybe some people on this forum as well with good monitoring abodes. Some of us have said so, even while deferring to the beauty of analysis. The UH7000 also has a dominant odd order harmonic, by a good bit, which I believe is heard as a very slightly "rough" character to the sound, whatever you like to call the odd order tone, vs the other interface with a more dominant even order harmonic. Please mind the subtlety of this perception, no it's not "night and day."

This could be debated, I have no doubt, but just to show that when you "zoom in" on the measurements, you see differences, rather than things being the same. I'm sure the argument would be about the threshold of human perception. How much detail can we really hear. How much does it matter, and so on. I think that's why these conversion threads go round and round. Even with most things audio being rather fine points, this point is even more miniscule. Kind of like tasting finer vodkas. Lots of purity and such ephemeral characteristics. Which is why I find it so fascinating, and anyway, really nice thread.

All that being said, seems to me you would appreciate what the N brings to the sonic table. You’d just have the practical part of giving up some Apollo features, dsp and needing some db25 cables.

I have a tbolt octo and haven’t missed the X’s 6 sharc chips at all.

I agree with you on the Apollo behind mid-forward sometimes to the point of honky. When I heard Apollo Twin vs some RME and Dangerous stuff, I thought it sounded almost high passed. Then I came to the realization that the UAD plugs, many of which add low end where the hardware certain does not (SSL, API), are all voiced around how the colored converter sounds.

I don’t find the MOTU muddy, I find it has some kind of nice universal warmth to it that doesn’t lie or kill the mids and top end. Like a less extreme, less detailed Lavry, which can be really warm down low and clinical up top.

RME in comparison has this full range but sterile tone with some treble nasties and Dangerous, well the Dbox and Source sounded excellent but almost bandpassed out of some of the lowest bass and higher treble, and the Convert is amazing but the higher treble feels a bit smoothed over, a bit too pleasing, than I knew it should be but otherwise, it was great.

The Prism Orpheus, Lyra, and Callia had most treble detail but I felt they were voiced like a typical British hifi speaker with fat punchy bass and some air boost that can lead to a sense of artificial clarity (mastering air boost) when good or when bad, sear but this clarity was not artificial.

I don’t think this is the frequency response but just the effects of the filters on the chips (or external), the electrical parts, the analog amplifiers after the da chip, and a sort of whole box tuning. These products still have to sound good for people to buy them.

Then they must have good drivers. The older Prism usb drivers would crap out before your CPU did on big sessions. The Dangerous xmos usb drivers didn’t even let you change the buffer. Only the best interface makers like RME, Lynx, and UAD have rock solid drivers most of the time in pretty much that order. But RME’s stability and UAD’s recent sample accurate alignment of multiple interfaces are pretty huge deals imo. MOTU can get weird.

That being said, the AD quality in all but the cheapest stuff like Behringer and Focusrite Scarlet is good enough. Even the Claret. If I don’t like the background timbre of something, I just universalize it with pre amp plugs and render every track through the same preset on Uhe Satin. Problem solved.

Been hearing the buzz about the Aurora (N). I'm currently running 32 channels of Avid HD I/O and was thinking of adding another 16, but just fell down the rabbit hole of researching other converters. I've heard shootouts on the A/D side between Avid 192's, Avid HD I/O's, Burl, Apogee Symphony, Focusrite RedNet and Lavry Gold. I was quite surprised at the differences between all of them. Not as subtle as I would have expected. What was funny is I've done a few tracking sessions at studios with the Burl mothership and they sounded great, but when doing shootouts later against other converters, the Burl came in last for me. Funny how our ears work. The Avid HD I/O has always sounded boring and sterile to me but I have accepted it as it plays nicely with PT. Might just have to give the Aurora a try to see.

Yeah converters are the one thing that’s an easy upgrade. It’s like getting a better pre or volume control but more significant because there’s digital tomfoolery going on, the ad boxtone is on everything, and the da is your window to the world and they’re all technically flat tonally but vary hugely in timbre.

Also thinking about ditching my 32 channels of HD I/O for the Lynx Aurora N. How stable has it been with Pro Tools? At home I’m using the HD Native box. Be nice to have something a bit more compact/up to date.