| This is actually very interesting. A while back Joe at jlmaudio.com was about to offer a product or a kit that used his transformers, some resistors and the SM Pro PR8IIA card (which is used to add ADAT to their own microphone preamp units) to make a transformer balanced input to ADAT.
The transformers were wired backwards to step down 4 to 1 and the OPAMPs on the ADAT card were bypassed. Essentially, less some resistor padding and impedance matching - this would have been a transformer to AD converter directly.
Sure the transformer would colour it a little - but likely in a nice way. The argument was also had that Tape machines sounded great because of the ton of transformers in them.
Although I was relentless in asking about it - the project was on hold because of the availability of the PR8IIA cards. These cards were being sold really cheap though for about $100 US. The 8 transformers from JLM would have been about $350 and the resistors essentially free.
When I saw this box come out, I asked Joe if they had stolen his idea but I didn't hear back from him. I think Joe may have some loose association with SM Pro - although Joe's stuff is super pro as opposed to SM's just being pro in language.
CC |