apogee stuff

[phil kerg]

Anyone around tried the new Apogee ad16 ? (16 ad's to aes & adat output ,96khz uv22 etc 1 rack space) Seems cool.
I just saw it on the Apogee website, I don't know about the price & I couldn't tell if it's the AD 8000 or Trk2 class or some kind of LC equipment.
In fact I don't think Apogee would make any LC equipment.... but never know what may happen in the brave hd new world.

phil

[Mark Staples]

My understanding, from talking with the sales guy at Apogee, that they are better A/D D/A converters than the 8000, Rosetta, Trak 2, and PS-100. They are the latest and greatest of the technology. If I remember correctly, they are about what the PS-100SE are.

[bluemt]

If you spoke with an engineer I'd believe you.

[rsmith123]

Max,
Where are you? [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

[rsmith123]

Posted by Max in 2 forums.

"In preparation for a very big, no-holds-barred, listening/training session with one of our bigger dealers over the weekend at Mix This, a few of us had the oppourtunity to pit the Apogee stuff against some of the competition as well as against each other. The results were very interesting.

For example, in tests with an acoustic guitar and a Bosendorfer grand piano using the AD-16 and the AD-8000-SE, all of us felt that the differences were negligible (this was with both units going through the DA-16).

The best combinations of the night (night being a loose term for the wee hours of the morning, which is when we decided to call it) were the AD-8000-SE and the AD-16 and DA-16 respectively.

Frankly, some of the folks were very suprised at how well the AD-16 held up to the AD-8000-SE. This is a very underrated converter that kind of sneaks up on you in a test like this.

If there was a difference, I would say the AD-16 was a bit more transparent when compared to the AD-8000-SE. And please note that when I say "a "bit", we are talking splitting hairs here. That does not mean the AD-16 sounded better; some of us preferred the AD-16; others preferred the AD-8000-SE

So there you have it, fresh from the studio."

------------------
Max Gutnik
Director of Sales
Apogee Electronics

[phil kerg]

Thank's for your reply's.
All these opinions sound good, but they seem to come from the Apogee team !
Any other "independant" feedbacks ?

BTW with that kind of machine, did anybody had the opportunity to do A/B tests between AES & Adatpipe ?
The point is : when a converter is able to deliver both AES & lightpipe signals, is one of them better than the other ? ( bandwith, reliability, etc.)

cheers to all

phil

[schnauser]

For what its worth: I bought an AD16 roughly 9 months ago, early enough that I had to send it back to Apogee for a firmware upgrade. I used it for a project that lasted 2 months. It worked perfectly and sounded great using the UV22 and softlimit the whole time (I was tracking to blackface adats and needed the dithering) In general I feel much more confident in dithering through hardware than software, but I am no Mastering Engineer Guru. If you love/need lightpipe I think the AD16 a great solution. I never used the AES Output. I sold the unit on ebay last month and got all my money back--only because I have upgraded my adats and now transfer files into ProTools using FireWire. While only one opinion, I believe sweating over A/D conversion is meaningless COMPARED to 1. musicianship 2. songwriting 3. acoustic space being recorded 4. performance. HiFi is beautiful, but it never made a mediocre performance sound compelling to me.