Problem with spl gainstation 1

[Trenta2bit]

Hi, I'm a singer and pianist, I record my voice in a poorly treated environment with a RE20 that goes into a Cloudlifter and enters an Audient iD14. I have always been intrigued by external preamplifiers and since I wanted to upgrade, a few days ago I bought a used spl gainstation 1 preamplifier with A/D converter at a good price, many advised me against buying it since I used the preamplifiers of the 'audient which they say are very good but I was curious to do this test. The problem is that the A/D conversion card of the preamplifier doesn't work, my goal was to connect the preamplifier with an optical cable to the Audient iD14 in order to bypass its preamplifiers but unfortunately the optical output of the spl does not send any signal therefore I currently use it passing through the preamp of the audience. What do you advise me to do? Do I fix the A/D converter board of the external preamp or do I get a separate board with A/D D/A converters to make my Adam A8X sound better too?

 

[TalismanRich]

What you are saying here really doesn't make a lot of sense. You want to add a preamp and another A/D D/A converter to make your speakers sound better?

If you think that using a tube preamp is going to add something to your recordings, then just use the analog output of the GainStation into your Audient interface. The Audient has pretty transparent preamps. It's not like the Audient is going to remove anything. Any change that the first preamp makes should pass seamlessly as long as you don't overdrive the Audient input. If you hit the tube hard and saturate the signal, the Audient will pass that right through.

If you're unhappy with the Adams, then you need to be looking for different speakers. Adding an AD/DA converter will do nothing to improved the speakers.

 

[Trenta2bit]

I don't see anything strange in what I said, I have an external pre-amplifier which I prefer to the pre-amplifiers of the id14 audience, since I can't get the optical link between the external pre-amplifier and the sound card to work, I would like advice on a sound card that just act as a/d d/a converter with higher quality than my audient id14. I love my adam a8x and if i can have
the possibility of a better d/a conversion doesn't mean i don't like my adam a8x. Then even if the audient preamplifiers are quite transparent I would still like to bypass them also to use a better a/d converter than the one of the audient id14.