Quality of the analog A/D converters?

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Micronesia
Posts: 61
Joined: Wed Nov 09, 2005 4:00 pm

Post by Micronesia »

Hello

The way i plan using my future Pulsar 2 card is by routing for instance a Nordlead synthesizer into the Pulsar 2 card for effect processing.
However, i am not going to use an outboard mixer, and therefore all of the signal will go thru the Pulsar 2.

So my question is if you belive higher frequensys and such will go lost in this process because of the converters.

For instance, a long time ago when the only soundcard i had was a soundblaster audigy i could clearly hear the difference in listening to the soundsource directly from the outboard mixer, or routed via the soundcard ins. The higher frequensis got a new character to say the least :razz:

I guess somewhat of this effect will occur with the Pulsar 2, but the question is - how much?
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astroman
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Joined: Fri Feb 08, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Germany

Post by astroman »

well, I don't know the Audigy and I have just a Pulsar One - but I had the SBLive and I can confirm that this behaved exactly as you write.
Yet I guess you're on the wrong track - it's not the frequency response, but the phase fidelity of the signal.
And imho all CWA converters are pretty good in this context. The older ones may be a little 'noisy' (if -85 dB on a 20 bit converter qualifies as such :wink: ), but they just sound good and trustworthy.
I do not think that a Pulsar Two's converters are inferior to it's predecessor's.

In any case you have to keep in mind that there's an analog stage which has an influence on the sound, too - you cannot have a converter virtually dangling in time and space :wink:

cheers, Tom
ScofieldKid
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Post by ScofieldKid »

I think the current generation of Creamware cards are pretty darn nice in this respect. Here's a related link on performance: http://www.ebridge-services.nl/soundcar ... 048kHz.htm
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