AnalogSteph
Major Contributor
Which arguably is the kind of place a holy grail converter should be at. In 1998, it was absolute state of the art. These reportedly will hit over 120 dB in loopback, absolutely unheard of at the time. You won't find many things with no less than 8 (!) Motorola 56009 DSPs either. (Mind you, they cost as much as a decent car and never turned a profit either...)Sold to a mastering studio in Paris 7 odd years ago.
Speaking of insanely good converters from 1998, another good candidate for Amir to be measured would be the Prism Sound Dream AD-2 ADC. Its dynamic range spec is 130dB unweighted (!), though that's at a whopping +28 dBu. Still, we're talking "capture the entire dynamic range of a large-diaphragm condenser" kind of terrain.
Coming back to the Aurora 8, its specs are as follows:
Analog I/O
[...]
Level +4 dBu nominal / +20 dBu max. or
-10 dBV nominal / +6 dBV maxInput Impedance Balanced mode: 24k Ω
Unbalanced mode: 12k ΩOutput Impedance Balanced mode: 100 Ω
Unbalanced mode: 50 ΩOutput Drive 600 Ω impedance, 0.2 μF capacitance
Analog In Performance
Frequency Response 20 Hz - 20 kHz, +0/-0.1 dB Dynamic Range 117 dB, A-weighted Channel Crosstalk -120 dB maximum, 1 kHz signal, -1 dBFS THD + N -108 dB (0.0004%) @ -1 DBFS
-104 dB (0.0006%) @ -6 DBFS
1 kHz signal, 22 Hz - 22 kHz BW
Analog Out Performance
Frequency Response 20 Hz - 20 kHz, +0/-0.1 dB Dynamic Range 117 dB, A-weighted Channel Crosstalk -120 dB max., 1 kHz signal, -1 dBFS THD + N -107 dB (0.00045%) @ -1 DBFS
-106 dB (0.00050%) @ -6 DBFS
1 kHz signal, 22 Hz - 22 kHz BW
Converters used are
Type | DR nom | THD+N nom | |
---|---|---|---|
ADC | CS5381 | 120 dB(A) | -110 dB @ -1 dBFS |
DAC | CS4398 | 120 dB(A) | -108 dB @ 0 dBFS |
I don't think either chip is good for much more than about 117 dB(A) in real life, so the Aurora is pretty much maxing them out. The new Focusrite Clarett+ 2Pre with CS5381 makes it to 117.5 dB(A) according to @Julian Krause.
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