Hey Damon, have you had a chance to put your Lynx against the over three times as much Apogee converters?
I am in the process of remastering some mixes that the producer spent like $75 an hour at a mastering place that used Apogee's. The Lynx obviously has pointed out some pretty severe harshness in the mastered versions of the mixes that we didn't hear at the mastering house. It blew my mind to hear stuff that I couldn't hear on Apogee's through a $450 card.
Outright, the Lynx card is a gem in audio. The true test of any soundcard is the A/D/A converters. Usually, you cannot even get decent 16 bit A/D/A converters for less then $1000 for 2 channels, much less any decent 20 or 24 bit converters.
I imagine that the Lynx people are still living poor seeing's that they sell a card that sounds as good or better than Apogee's, which are considered some of the best A/D/A converters in the world, for about 3 times less. To me, if I needed another two channels I would just buy another Lynx. Yeah, so I don't have 8 I/O's for $1000, but I know that I have 4 of the best 24 bit converters available for that price. This is something that you may not find with cards offering 8 I/O's for the same price. In fact, many of these 8 I/O cards are not 24 bit at all. Many times they do not provide any more than about 18 bits in real life. For that matter, it may not even be a decent 18 bits.
I have heard many recordings done through these other cards, and while the recordings where decent enough, they didn't sound like 24 bits to me. They really didn't even sound like 20 bits. In fact, they often don't sound a whole lot better than my 16 bit ADAT's do. So, I wouldn't get all hung up on most manufactures 24 bit claims. In most cases this is an exagerated claim. If the card offers DSP on the card, they will often lead you to believe that the converters are 24 bit, but they actually mean that there is 24 bit processing. Also, you need to look for specs that specify 24 bit Linear, not compressed. But often, a manufacture will not lead on untill you ask them that their converters use some sort of compression that is supposed to "emulate" 24 bits.
Anyway guys, don't eliminate the Lynx card just because it only offers 2 A/D/A converters. The quality of those converters are surely much much better than these wanna be 24 bit cards. The price itself would suggest this.
Ed
