Lynx hilo 2?

the only reason we have digital audio tools that are just as useful as most analog or surpass most analog tools is FIR filters. For someone to make the preposterous claim that the they’re bad and to condemn them suddenly for the final anti-alias filter of their converter is fucking nuts especially when the signal has already passed through numerous fir filters: what is controlling the multiplier of the signal (lookahead dynamics, multirate side chains, all modern digital limiters), correcting the iir filters (running them at a higher sampling rate or in the handleful of digital eqs that use a fir filter to correct the cramped iir filters at single sample rates. The latter can sound pretty good but aren’t as accurate as just running the iir filter at a higher sample rate and it might be automated), or creating the pcm files that are being manipulated in the daw and played back by the da converter.

There are some plugin developers that use iir anti-alias filters in their algorithms but they, eg u-he, overloud, softube, mostly target their products at vsti musicians and started in a time of much less powerful CPUs when running an fir filter at a low buffer at 88.2 or 96 khz would grind a computer to a halt. Their plugins for musicians still sound pretty good but only their plugins that do not shift the phase (or are part of phase scrambling fx, eg reverbs, delays, old broadcast processor emulation, tape) work easily in a mix on recordings of real instruments without screwing things up.

People on Head-fi buy Hilos. They love to mess with stuff. A lot of people on audiophile forums are high on compulsion and low on objective audio knowledge. They are always toying with things, buying thousands of dollars of gear, etc, because they're trying to solve problems caused by flaws in the designs, impedance mismatches, and things like that. I've always appreciated the candor of guys like Dan because these companies need to be held accountable. These are business relationships we have with them and we can't lose sight of that.

People who believe that maybe cutting out the inaudible content in a way that is certain to distort the audible content improves the fidelity of the audible content.

Lynx also get to claim lower round trip latency over usb for the vsti musicians with computers too crappy to run at low buffer at double sampling rates.

Happily not on this rather level headed forum.

It's not a "suck" button though, various methodologies have different trade off's. More speed for less accuracy, the dork in me relates it to building a new character for an RPG game where you might have a lot of strength but the trade off is agility. You only get a certain number of "points" to use and there is no free lunch.

Whether someone cares, notices, enjoys it more I honestly could never say or ever attempt to guess. Although I will say nothing about this is theoretical, filters wouldn't exist in the first place otherwise, they're created to solve a technical issue and there's multiple ways to go about it. External clocking is also not theoretical, at best it doesn't change anything and at worst it can mess up your clocking.

What we seem to struggle with is separating technicalities from preference, converters are as a simile like doctors in which their purpose is to do no harm. It doesn't mean that after your appointment you can't pickup a pack of 20, go to the nearest bar and order 5 shots. Some might prefer that, some definitely won't but if it's the converter mangling things you're stuck with that.

Take another example, standalone I prefer the sound of my MOTU 1248 to the Carbon and I know the former is technically inferior. However when I mangle the sound with the SSL the Carbon works best because of the level of transparency whereas the MOTU imparts a sound of its own as well. Technically superior doesn't often equate to "better" sounding but all these super smart people who create this stuff do it for a reason.

been a rough few months and I’m disgusted with a lot of shit: gear, gear marketing, ersatzes, artists not ready to play live yet alone to go to the studio but they went to the studio with the music not even being written, certain manufacturers, labels, and promoters. Sorry.

yeah all my posts in this thread I want to convey that the manufacturers, designers, and programmers should take care of all the technical things for you so you can use the equipment to make recordings and music without having to think about your signal path when you turn it on. But they mostly don’t. Sad.

Everything has to go through a converter, even monitoring playback (D / A) or we wouldn't be able to hear it. Transparent will often sound thin or boring, when we start stripping out things like harmonic distortion which is a vital mixing tool for speaker playback and general excitement enhancement things might not go the way you think. So, a quick example is let's say I play a 30Hz sine on a 5" speaker with a reproduction limit of 65Hz, what happens?.... Nothing, you wouldn't hear it, in a regular representation you'd hear the harmonics of a fundamental note. That alone shows why you'd add HD and how important it is.

There's many more examples of anti-boring, we often like tape for example however that's usually just soft clipping or "saturation". You're exceeding the limitations of this specific device which ends up causing a wave to be rounded at its threshold, this is not to be confused with horrible hard clipping which happens when you exceed the limitations of a converter or even anything generally with opamps in it (even if the effect is slightly different). Anyway, before this turns into a book on audio when we mix we do a lot of things that are entirely contrary to what a converter would ever do and the funny thing here is tape was a recording medium which mangled stuff. Some liked it, some didn't..

Going further I can even understand people liking jitter, I mean we use delay's and verbs, we double track guitars for variations in timing. However the whole point of all of these technical threads are, from a logical standpoint why would you ever want your converter to do any of this? Mainly because simply put you have zero control over it, jitter isn't a beat quantized delay plugin, if something was out of time like a guitar recording you'd just re-record it right? But jitter is random so it's like shooting in the dark. Neither could you have perfectly added even or odd harmonic distortion at chosen frequencies / specific noise that suits your particular taste and works for every track. This is why we've had tools since? When did the Aphex Aural Exciter come out? Anyway the point again is you can do all of this after the fact but in a controlled manner, so again why would you want your converter doing this again?

A converters job isn't necessarily to sound great, what it is meant to do is keep a signal intact so you can make it sound great. I think one of the issues vs. classical engineering is the approach, not only was old equipment technically inferior which added its own gubbins in, the main methodology of getting a "sound" was selecting hardware to interact and compliment each other. Mic's were even developed to be tracked to tape for example, nowaday's without consoles, outboard, tape or even in some cases external preamps which interface preamps are generally great but they're usually made to compliment manufacturer specs which means dead quiet, clean, no saturation, nothing..

With ITB you have to think about stuff you wouldn't in a traditional setup, latency, pan law, harmonic distortion, dither etc. and its become more of a technical approach in some area's. Coming from a console background even though I'm a techie originally I found this stuff confusing at first and it did come to bite me on occasion.

Ohh yeah, this a Lynx Hilo thread , from the specs it looks like nothing's changed on the monitor outs.