Middleman
Professional Amateur
Just thought I would share my experience with the LynxTwo converters. Not cheap and I had some apprehension regarding the price. Yeah I know this probably belongs in the soundcard forum but, as this card is higher end, it didn’t seem right to put this down there with the Sound Blaster conversations.
The install, was a pain in the butt. Lynx needs to work on their software mixer documentation and UI. Not intuitive by any means. Also, how long have software designers been putting the About menu under the Help menu in Windows software? Maybe since Windows 3.1, however, Lynx has this choice under the Mixer menu. I just like things to be where they are supposed to be having designed software in a former life. Not a big deal but slightly raised my,” Do these guys have it together?”, red flag.
The mixer software, what a goat rodeo! Three windows, none labeled intuitively. Let’s see there is the Mixer Adapter window, the Mixer Output Window and the Mixer Record/Play window. Every option known to man in routing with tiny little buttons marked with short 1-3 letter acronyms which if I have a couple of hours I will someday learn what they all mean.
I followed the instructions, fired up Sonar and …………..no sound.
Ok, I do have two other soundcards running but there is nothing in the manual warning about non compatibility with other cards so on the outside chance there is, I disabled the other two, uninstalled the drivers and disabled them in Windows.
Fired up Sonar and…………………………………………no sound.
I checked the latency on the driver and it was 128 msec. Ok lets play with that. Eventually I was able to get a slow warbled non useful sound out of the card by upping the buffers even more.
Ok, time to check those drivers. I had two choices, ASIO and WDM. The WDM are beta and do not come in the box so I downloaded them off the site, installed them and fired up Sonar.
My audio tracks played fine however none of my midi synths were working. Well actually about every 10 seconds I would hear one midi sound from either the bass or keyboards but not consistently. It was midnight, I had been working on this since 5PM, took an hour off for dinner though, but I’m done.
9AM the next morning
Called tech support and phone answered on the first ring (a very encouraging sign). The tech support person was polite, efficient and told me that everything was fine but I probably needed to get off the beta drivers and go with ASIO, much more stable in his words.
He also indicated that once you switch drivers in Sonar, that a reboot was required (not documented anywhere but hey, we were on a roll). I rebooted the machine and voila! The beast she works. I was very pleased.
Time for the listen test – LynxTWO vs M-Audio 24/96
You spend the money; you want to be sure that you are not getting ripped off. Is a $900 soundcard that much better than one costing $149?
I played my usual test files both commercial and home built mixes. The first thing I noticed is the tails of strings, guitars and pianos seemed to linger a few milliseconds; this creating an ambiance the same files did not have using my Audiophile 24/96. As some of these had been created on the 24/96, the conclusion is that this card does a good job of capturing external sounds but doesn’t do a good job of relaying the results. There were details in the files recorded on the M-Audio that the Lynx revealed. So, it’s true about having a quality DA solution for mixing. Not that I did not believe what everyone has been saying but it’s nice to verify it with your own ears.
Sound fonts sounded more realistic, much more detailed and believable. Reverb tails and overall halls sounds were much richer, once again, detailed and more professional sounding.
An unexpected result is the ability to hear compression more accurately. There were some files which had slightly too much compression, something I was not hearing prior. When I made the changes, slight adjustments in plug ins could also be heard vs. larger adjustments on the M-Audio that were required before I heard a difference.
The overall difference was a much more open and natural sound, reduced harshness in the upper end and a more 3 dimensional soundstage. Kind of the like the difference between two paintings; one that seeks to capture light the other detail. One is an impressionistic experience the other is like seeing, or in this case hearing, the actual thing.
Someone has already put up files on these two cards so I won’t duplicate that effort. I just wanted to pass along the experience that those files equate to my own listening experience.
If you want quality results you have to get to a certain level in your equipment, the difference in sound quality is very significant. I leave it to others as to whether the cost is worth it. I will say that Lynx tech support was stellar; no attitude and fast at diagnosing the problem. They get a few dings on user experience or OOBE (out of box experience) but all is forgiven with a response like their tech support provided. The product is running rock solid after about 6 hours and was also compatible with my UAD-1, praise the engineers that make this happen.
The install, was a pain in the butt. Lynx needs to work on their software mixer documentation and UI. Not intuitive by any means. Also, how long have software designers been putting the About menu under the Help menu in Windows software? Maybe since Windows 3.1, however, Lynx has this choice under the Mixer menu. I just like things to be where they are supposed to be having designed software in a former life. Not a big deal but slightly raised my,” Do these guys have it together?”, red flag.
The mixer software, what a goat rodeo! Three windows, none labeled intuitively. Let’s see there is the Mixer Adapter window, the Mixer Output Window and the Mixer Record/Play window. Every option known to man in routing with tiny little buttons marked with short 1-3 letter acronyms which if I have a couple of hours I will someday learn what they all mean.
I followed the instructions, fired up Sonar and …………..no sound.
Ok, I do have two other soundcards running but there is nothing in the manual warning about non compatibility with other cards so on the outside chance there is, I disabled the other two, uninstalled the drivers and disabled them in Windows.
Fired up Sonar and…………………………………………no sound.
I checked the latency on the driver and it was 128 msec. Ok lets play with that. Eventually I was able to get a slow warbled non useful sound out of the card by upping the buffers even more.
Ok, time to check those drivers. I had two choices, ASIO and WDM. The WDM are beta and do not come in the box so I downloaded them off the site, installed them and fired up Sonar.
My audio tracks played fine however none of my midi synths were working. Well actually about every 10 seconds I would hear one midi sound from either the bass or keyboards but not consistently. It was midnight, I had been working on this since 5PM, took an hour off for dinner though, but I’m done.
9AM the next morning
Called tech support and phone answered on the first ring (a very encouraging sign). The tech support person was polite, efficient and told me that everything was fine but I probably needed to get off the beta drivers and go with ASIO, much more stable in his words.
He also indicated that once you switch drivers in Sonar, that a reboot was required (not documented anywhere but hey, we were on a roll). I rebooted the machine and voila! The beast she works. I was very pleased.
Time for the listen test – LynxTWO vs M-Audio 24/96
You spend the money; you want to be sure that you are not getting ripped off. Is a $900 soundcard that much better than one costing $149?
I played my usual test files both commercial and home built mixes. The first thing I noticed is the tails of strings, guitars and pianos seemed to linger a few milliseconds; this creating an ambiance the same files did not have using my Audiophile 24/96. As some of these had been created on the 24/96, the conclusion is that this card does a good job of capturing external sounds but doesn’t do a good job of relaying the results. There were details in the files recorded on the M-Audio that the Lynx revealed. So, it’s true about having a quality DA solution for mixing. Not that I did not believe what everyone has been saying but it’s nice to verify it with your own ears.
Sound fonts sounded more realistic, much more detailed and believable. Reverb tails and overall halls sounds were much richer, once again, detailed and more professional sounding.
An unexpected result is the ability to hear compression more accurately. There were some files which had slightly too much compression, something I was not hearing prior. When I made the changes, slight adjustments in plug ins could also be heard vs. larger adjustments on the M-Audio that were required before I heard a difference.
The overall difference was a much more open and natural sound, reduced harshness in the upper end and a more 3 dimensional soundstage. Kind of the like the difference between two paintings; one that seeks to capture light the other detail. One is an impressionistic experience the other is like seeing, or in this case hearing, the actual thing.
Someone has already put up files on these two cards so I won’t duplicate that effort. I just wanted to pass along the experience that those files equate to my own listening experience.
If you want quality results you have to get to a certain level in your equipment, the difference in sound quality is very significant. I leave it to others as to whether the cost is worth it. I will say that Lynx tech support was stellar; no attitude and fast at diagnosing the problem. They get a few dings on user experience or OOBE (out of box experience) but all is forgiven with a response like their tech support provided. The product is running rock solid after about 6 hours and was also compatible with my UAD-1, praise the engineers that make this happen.
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