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Anyone with experience of dCS converters? They often come tops in opinion polls. Is it the sound quality, build, versatility or a combination of these attributes? Looking more into the technicalities the internal program with flash- memory can be easily updated over the web making them fairly future proof. Opinions welcomed.

Comments

Ang1970 Sun, 12/16/2001 - 10:23

For me, sound quality is the hook. They're not much to look at build-wise, not the heaviest boxes in the world, so don't jump up and down on it even if you're barefoot. The earlier models had options like input, output, sync in... they were designed to do one thing and do that one thing well.

So my opinion is they sound f'in great. Top shelf quality, which is not surprising considering the top shelf price.

I am currently organizing a shootout between dCS, dB Technologies, and Benchmark ADC's. I'll post a thread when it happens.

Ang1970 Sun, 12/16/2001 - 18:16

Yes, Kyle is graciously hooking me up with the Benchmark stuff. He is the one who turned me on to their stuff. And yes, he is cool! :)

I will try out whatever bells & whistles are on each box, but will try not to use those to compare to each other. I want to try and keep it apples vs. apples as much as possible.

For the test, I intend to take a full mix coming off a J-9000 into each box, one at a time, routed back into PT on the same 2 input tracks for recording. Each box will be slaved to house wordclock, most likely aardsync2. Once I have passes from each box, I'll be able to set up a session with all of them lined up sample accurate and switch back and forth for comparison.

It would be even more interesting if I could take each box and simultaneously track an entire song thru all 3 boxes, each track in triplicate. That however would require a lot of spare studio time.

I may also include the Apogee if time allows, and the Cranesong if anyone cares to lend one for the cause.

Ang1970 Mon, 12/17/2001 - 17:26

Just got a call today from Frazer Jones of Independent Audio, the USA distributor for dCS. He says he'll have a spare box around the middle to end of January, and that there's an appreciable improvement to the analog board on the new model. So I'll be waiting until then to put this whole thing together. Maybe enough time for me to locate a loose Cranesong as well.