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there is a little chance that an error in the Fantom cancells an error in one of the AD's but that is not very likely.
It doesn't matter if thy are transparent or not since all signal (including the "original" will be affected the same way by your DA monitoring!! you are listenning to the samples from the same setup for each one right??
No, it doesn't really matter how transparent the Fantom's D/A converters are. It's not about errors. What matters is that
we can't hear them. We can't hear the same signal that the three A/D converters here, so we don't know how accurate they are. Just because two of them sound closer to one another doesn't mean that they're more accurate. The D/A we monitor through has nothing to do with it since, as you mentioned, we are listening to all three signals through it. However we are not listening to samples from the same setup for each one. For the three samples with converters we are listening to the signal through the Fantom's D/A converters, into the A/D converter being tested, and then through our D/A converter. For the "reference" sample we are listening to the signal though our D/A converter, nothing else. For the test to be valid we'd have to be able to hear the reference sample through the D/A converter, which is impossible without going there (or at least without having a Fantom XR at our disposal).
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and as far as the original it has no conversion true so when the conversion has gone thru the aurora m audio and rosetta they all had the same source to begin with !! (The fantom converted to analog signal) at this point what is changed by the fantom conversion can only be accentuated by the other converter. The more the difference from the original, the more the converter (apogee lynx m audio) did to the "already" modified sound (by the fantom DA)
You can't know that. What you need to compare to is the signal
after it's passed through the Fantom's converters, not before.
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We have a reference track (which I haven't heard :-) and we have some combination of AD and DA in the three tracks. Any alternation on the three tracks from the reference is coloration from the contenders AD since the Fantom DA and your own DA is the same for all tracks.
What we're concerned with here is the fourth track, which is the so-called "reference" track. We need to know how the other three tracks compare to the sound coming out of the Fantom's D/A converters. The reference track tells us nothing about that.
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It seems this is much about the Fantom DA and the questioning of it's quality but that reasoning doesn't make an awfull lot of sense since everybody has gear that colors the signal somewhere.
No, it is not about the Fantom's D/A or its quality...it's about us not being able to
hear the Fantom's D/A.
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no problem, as far as everybody talking about listening, this test is not entended for the DA monitoring side of the converters but only for the AD. you actually don't even need to listen, just by looking at the frequency snapshot you can tell which is closer
Then why listen at all?
And still, you can't tell which is closer, because we don't have a "frequency snapshot" of the signal coming right off of the Fantom's outputs.
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You can use ANY sound as a reference.
True. But for it to be a valid test we need to be able to hear that reference, and we can't.
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Well my cabling is Brand new Mogami Gold and works for the 2 other devices so why not for the rosetta?..hummm do they make special cables that will work for my rosetta? I was not aware that some kind of cables (generic pro AUDIO CABLES) could NOT work on some devices.
It's not about the quality of a cable, it's how a balanced input "sees" an unbalanced signal. Some are fine if you simply present them with an unbalanced signal, and some are not. This is another thing that needs to be known for a test like this to be performed properly.
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Its very simple. Source= the track which has already been prerecorded and mixed. It already exists and nothing will change the way it sounds. Accurate= means how well each converters preserves the original mix. We can hear the source and then determine how accurate it is. With the acoustic guitar and voice, we don't know what it sounds like coming straight out of your pres, thus there is no source.
Saying "nothing will change the way it sounds" is wrong. Any D/A converter you run that signal through will change the way the source sounds.
You said "we can hear the source"...but we can't. The source is the sound coming out of the Fantom's D/A converters.
As for the acoustic guitar and voice, you are correct. But the same holds true for the Fantom, since we don't know what it sounds like coming straight out of the Fantom's analog outputs. In either case, to do this type of test properly, you have to be there.