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Re: Sound Card Solutions?

Posted by aljordan (A) on January 8, 2007 at 20:48:29

In Reply to: Re: Sound Card Solutions? posted by aljordan on January 8, 2007 at 18:04:09:

Well, I tried the above and figured I would pass on the results before forgetting them. There were differences among the various configurations, but not much. Using each sound cards respective ASIO drivers, the M-Audio seemed to soften dynamics just a tad and had a bit less aparent detail, particularly in cymbals and acoustic guitar. The differences were apparent between the cards no matter whether the Lynx was hooked up via AES/EBU or converted to coax.

The differences may have been due to the different ASIO drivers because they were less aparent when using the kernel streaming output in Winamp. Please note also that my DAC is an Audio Aero Prima SE, which resamples and has a tubed output stage. While the DAC has a beautiful sound, I think it colors the results a bit to its own flavor. Differences may be more obvious with a more transparent DAC.

I can't say which sound I liked better. Mostly I preferred the Lynx using its native ASIO driver, but if a recording is problematic, a slight softening of details in the upper registers can be a little easier on the ears. In all cases the kernel streaming output added a bit of brightness to the results.

If I were buying a card only ro use the digital output, I am not sure the extra cost of the Lynx is worthwhile. The Lynx has better sounding DACs and ADCs than any other card I've used, but that would be wasted in your case. Your Soundblaster card resamples ro 48K and does not ship with ASIO drivers. Getting a card with good ASIO drivers for your operating system that avoids resampling will probably make a worthwhile improvement over the SoundBlaster Live. I used to have one of those and I remembered an improvement when buying my first M-Audio card. Maybe you could try an ESI or EMU card and save a fair amount of money over the Lynx with compairable results.

Alan

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