hey pat, rereading my words i think i came across edgy and that wasn't my intention, i apologize for that. sometimes what feels like matter-of-factness in my head, when i view it later, looks somehow aggressive. lousy words!
the thing about feeding a signal thru a rosetta d/a--> a/d loop is that the source has already been digitized; the finest nuances are lost already. where i find the coloration of apogee to be marked is in comparing it what's coming off the board or, better still, off of tape. this is where the burl shines to me and most other converters fall (literally) flat to my ears. the burl 'feels' like the source; like almost every othrr converter on the planet it shifts the tone, but unlike most others it carries 100% of the weight, depth, and soul of the sound. it doesn't sound identical, but it doesn't sound like a digital capture. apogee does, mytek does, lavry does.
so the question for me is not what's more colored, the units in this thread are equally guilty of lacking utter transparency. for me it's what kind of color am i dealing with, and what are the ramifications of subjecting every sound in a mix, plus the final mix itself, to that filter?
fwiw, i never meant to imply you are any more biased than i. now that this thread is 6000 days dead i'll just say that i was 'paid' a rev 1 iPhone in exchange for spending a day in the studio, writing and recording a song, and posting my honest, psyched, and *extremely* biased opinion on what i thought of the burls. either i'm a horrible businessman who severely undervalues his time and gifts, or i had other motivations for putting forth the considerable time and effort involved in presenting the sounds and opinions i did.
the implication many seem to make, and you are implicitly invoking, is that the mere fact of my compensation calls into question the integrity and plausibility of my position. to which i can only say that ime people tend to believe of and condemn in others what they fear to be true of themselves. that this thread somehow became the tempest in a teapot that it did speaks volumes on the smallness of some of the egos involved. it was in many ways a low point in my experience of this community.
it is disappointing to have you so casually play on that suspicious perspective when i simply called you out for theorizing the tonal character of a piece of gear you've never used. that your logic has an internal bootstrapping coherence does not mitigate the fact that you have, and still continue, to speculate on that which you do not know for yourself. and what is most perplexing to me is that i cannot begin to fathom why you choose to do so.
gregory scott - 'ubk'