First, stating that you hear a difference is not the same as demonstrating that you hear a difference. If you ABXed the difference successfully in 13 out of 16 tries, I’ll agree that you can tell them apart. Otherwise, I politely decline to accept your statement as fact.

Your suggestion that all differences in specs result in audible differences simply isn’t borne out by research into human hearing. There are known limits to our ability to recognize changes in distortion, frequency response, and noise. Once those limits are passed, human beings can’t recognize any further change.

And in fact the color of the box or the label on the front or your neighbor’s opinion or a thread on Gearslutz will have a lot more impact on your perception of the sound of a device than a change from .001 THD to .00001 THD. Thus the need for double blind level matched same performance comparisons. Anything else is just opinion.

Fran

These results are interesting, and indeed I could pick the hardy due to the noise floor of the m-audio being at prosumer levels. Thanks for doing these comparisons, it is interesting. The guitar playing is great too btw! its nice to have a nice sounding guitar and some good playing instead of the usual comparison a/b clips which don’t often feature good musicianship!

I’ve owned both the Lynx and the 2626. I record more than just acoustic guitars at once and found that as soon as you start layering tracks with the m-audio, the results start to become a lot clearer about what piece of equipment is professional and which is not.

I also think that, like you say elsewhere, the biggest difference anyone can make to their recording chain is in room treatment. However, I think it is important to note that going back in the logical order in the chain to microphone, then preamp, then converter all make differences. When added up, the weakest link in this chain is always apparent in some way. If, for example, you recorded an acoustic guitar track longer and with dynamic changes than the sample you provided with the profire, we would be stuck with the noise. Sure, you can gate some of it off, but you would be eating into the level of detail in the recording. I’m sure if you didn’t close mic the two recordings there would also be a more significant difference as the noise floor and details are often in the subtleties of the room.

If you listen with a high quality pair of headphones (say senn hd600s or similar) directly to audio (say a well recorded track such as Dire Straits ‘Money for Nothing’ or similar) played back through the profire, and a/b it with audio played back through the lynx, then you will hear a big difference in terms of conversion quality. I did. If I still had the profire I’d be interested in doing the blind test and report back. The Lynx D/A is not by any means great as a d/a but it is acceptable. The profire in comparison sounds like it has higher distortion (it measurably does), more noise (it measurably does), more jitter (it measurably does) and it simply sounds more veiled and congested. There are actually measurable and objective ways of describing this that are well established – THD +N specifications, Dynamic Range specifications, Signal to noise ratios. All of these things make a difference and the better the specs, usually the higher the price (no surprise).

Regards

I resolved the foobar issue. Although I installed with “full” (and reinstalled after the problem to be sure), foobar_abx was not installed. If you google “foobar abx” you get a link to a place on the website where you can download it. When you unzip it you get a file foobar_abx.dll; move this into the “components” directory in the foobar2000 directory in the Program Files directory…. then open foobar and it works as Fran has described.

I got 5 correct guesses out of 5 comparing two files I downloaded from this site… but now I will have to track down what those were, as they aren’t the above .wav files! Will give the above files a try anon.

I’ve been enjoying your site, finding some of the clips useful.

I’ve installed foobar, but the only option I’m given after rightclicking a pair of selected files is “save as playlist”. If I save them as a playlist, load the playlist, and select the files and rightclick…same thing.

Can you help? I’d really like to ABX these (and other things!).

Thanks!

I checked the 3a and 3b clips and couldn’t hear a level difference. I used Adobe Audition to normalize the files to some approximation of equal loudness. Can you confirm that you heard significant level differences between these two clips?

Thanks for stopping by,
Fran

3rd test is of course incorrect, because of volume difference, perhaps it is better to normalize samples in audio editor. Other than volume maybe there is subtle difference in attack or strings details