Hi Bob Katz, cool to have you here!

A lot of us hear at Gearslutz often discuss how different AD and DA converters compare and what converters sound the best. Some of us are on a pretty tight budget and want to upgrade, some of us are simply just looking for the best sounding converters. A lot of users here have experiences with converters like for instance the RME Fireface 800 (the one that I use in my budget studio), the Apogee Rosetta 800 and the Lavry or Prism converters. Besides all this, some are using the converter mainly for preparing the final analog mix for the digital medium while others are recording directly to the DAW. As far as I know these two different approaches on recording set different converter requirements, since for instance with a lot of digital processing you get a lot of different errors that need to be compensated by a very clean digital input stream to match the analog counterparts. What's your view on this?

I'm just wondering, today it still seems to be very popular to record onto tape and late time convert to digital format, for the best sonic performance. Do you think this trend will continue or will we have a trend shift soon and see the big guys record completely ITB? I also think that a lot of us would like to get a professional's view on how big the difference in sonic performance (quantization erros, non-linearity, aperture errors...) is between converters like for instance the RME Fireface 800 and the Apogee Rosetta 800 and the difference between for instance the Apogee Rosetta 800 and the Lavry Gold or Prism? My understanding of this is that cheaper converters lack some in the quality of the velocity response which makes it a little flat or unmusical sounding and can also remove some of the natural decay as well as make the instrument definition a little more blurry due to lost signal (higher noise floor) and jitter. Could you please explain the importance of the converter in an ITB context and tell us a little about your view on the quality of the converters out there and what kind of focus we should have when dealing with converter upgrades? I guess we want to get a better picture of the importance of good converters, the role in different contexts and what converter to spend on depending on what kind of recording method we use...

Thanks!

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