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Re: Without addressing each point of your well-thought reply...

I suggest that you re-read my post again.

The bottom line is that if the soundcard can not adequately resolve certain levels or types of audio signals (errors of subtraction), then there will be nothing there to "difference", the sonic differences between the two recordings will be lost as they were incapable of being recorded in the first place.

If the sound card commits errors of addition, and adds a certain form of distortion to the signal, yes, it will be added to both recordngs, but once again, it will be blurring and hiding what either recording may be doing or not doing AT OR BELOW that level of signal abberation.

Even though both recordings will be exposed to the same level of contamination, and this level of contamination will 'cancel out', the fact remains that nothing at or below the level of contamination will be able to be examined via the difference method.

In other words, unless the soundcard is literally perfect, it has the capability to hide and to mask other devices sonic signatures, and I personally know of no soundcard that is sonically perfect.

Of course, if you tend to believe that such a thing exists (the sonically perfect soundcard), then you probably don't believe that very many sonic diference exist between audio components in the first place, and will be perfectly content to accept the specs as all that is needed to define a sonically perfect soundcard (or other audio component).
At this point, we have another dead end where someone has decided 'a priori' that something is sonically "good enough", and this is at the heart of the whole matter and debate.

If you truly believe that a $200 soundcard is sonically perfect, then why not build yourself the ultimate system around one? People who have gone the computer based audio route have found that even the multi-thousand dollar outboard USB/firewire DACs are not providing sonic perfection, the same issues that hold true for traditional component based audio are factors with the computer based audio. Only now, they have to deal with noisy computer power supply fans, the huge amount of digital based EMI/RFI pouring out of most computers and contaminating the audio signal, and the not insignificant task of interfacing such a computer based ssytem to the rest of a sound system (AC power line grounding isues, etc.).

Remember, the recordings have to go through the ADC input as well as the DAC output, try a "loop thru" on a sound card sometime, they are not sonically transparent.
Jon Risch


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