bdiament
Member of the Trade: Barry Diament Audio
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2010
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Hi Akabeth,
I've been using a Metric Halo ULN-8 (~$6k) for the past several years.
It serves as my DAC as well as my mic preamps and ADC for recording sessions.
Having been fortunate to hear a lot of converters over the years, the ULN-8, particularly when used at 192k easily represents (to my ears) the very best I've heard, by a good country mile. For the first time in my experience, I feel like I'm hearing my mic feeds directly and not the result of an A-D and D-A process.
In fact, a while back, prior to its commercial release earlier this year, members of the beta team got to compare three top notch recordings (one pop, one jazz and one a Keith Johnson classical recording) encoded from the original masters, using more than a dozen "contenders", including devices from Pacific Microsonics, Meitner, Cranesong, HEDD, Mytek, Prism, Lynx, Benchmark and several others. No one knew which was which. We all just received a large group of files, with the three recordings made by each converter (each set simply numbered "Set 1", "Set 2", etc.). Folks could listen on any system they liked, at their own pace. It was only after the responses came in that which converter was used for each of the file sets was revealed.
What was unusual in my experience was the degree of consensus among so many listeners, many of whom are professional engineers but a number of amateurs were also included. The overwhelming majority picked the same set I did. This was the set created by the ULN-8.
By the way, there is now a version without the mic preamps that sells for ~$4k, called the LIO-8.
Best regards,
Barry
http://www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
http://www.barrydiamentaudio.com
I've been using a Metric Halo ULN-8 (~$6k) for the past several years.
It serves as my DAC as well as my mic preamps and ADC for recording sessions.
Having been fortunate to hear a lot of converters over the years, the ULN-8, particularly when used at 192k easily represents (to my ears) the very best I've heard, by a good country mile. For the first time in my experience, I feel like I'm hearing my mic feeds directly and not the result of an A-D and D-A process.
In fact, a while back, prior to its commercial release earlier this year, members of the beta team got to compare three top notch recordings (one pop, one jazz and one a Keith Johnson classical recording) encoded from the original masters, using more than a dozen "contenders", including devices from Pacific Microsonics, Meitner, Cranesong, HEDD, Mytek, Prism, Lynx, Benchmark and several others. No one knew which was which. We all just received a large group of files, with the three recordings made by each converter (each set simply numbered "Set 1", "Set 2", etc.). Folks could listen on any system they liked, at their own pace. It was only after the responses came in that which converter was used for each of the file sets was revealed.
What was unusual in my experience was the degree of consensus among so many listeners, many of whom are professional engineers but a number of amateurs were also included. The overwhelming majority picked the same set I did. This was the set created by the ULN-8.
By the way, there is now a version without the mic preamps that sells for ~$4k, called the LIO-8.
Best regards,
Barry
http://www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
http://www.barrydiamentaudio.com
