I wrote:

- The M Audio "Flying Calf" A/D converter, surprisingly, held its own
against far more expensive converters, while the D/A section of the
"Flying Cow" converter was not nearly as good--though my "Cow" is an
older model, and the chips (cow chips?) in their newer models have a
higher specification.


whereupon Arny Krueger wrote:

There are also some board layout changes too, which may make for a
change in stability.

I tested two different revisions of the Flying Cow:

http://www.pcavtech.com/adc-dac/Cow/index.htm

The "Revision E" was pretty impressive, and says a lot for the philosophy
of continual evolutionary upgrades at M-Audio,

The Cow that I tested has a Rev. E board also. Its D/A wasn't nearly as
clean as, for example, the line output of a ~$100, 10-year-old Sony D-131
"Discman" portable CD player(!). I didn't test the Cow's A/D section.

The product that did test well from this series was a "Flying Calf" A/D,
labeled on the outside as the 20-bit version of this product and having
a "Rev. A" circuit board, also (c) 1997. It actually held its own fairly
well against a Lucid AD 9624 and a somewhat older Mytek (model AD 2018).

Perhaps the A/D section of the Flying Cow would have done equally well.

--best regards

P.S.: The equipment that I tested was all my own stuff, which I bought
at various times for various amounts, under various suppositions as to
what level of performance each piece of equipment would offer. I have
to admit that I found I had a real "vested interest" in the outcome of
these tests--I really wanted to see each piece of equipment perform as
well or as badly I had thought it should do.

This turned out not always to be the case. And after I had made graphs
of the noise and distortion for seven or eight preamps, for example, at
some moments I found myself staring again and again at certain graphs,
looking for the evidence that I felt _had_ to be there establishing the
superiority or inferiority of one or another item. I really wanted the
(x) preamp to be better than the (y) preamp, say, in part because I was
prepared to feel cool using preamp (x) at recording jobs, etc.

It was disturbing to have to accept that my mental picture of a product's
level of quality can be quite mistaken and even inauthentic, i.e. formed
on the basis of a product's "public image" (e.g. in this newsgroup) and,
perhaps, the "back story" of how I came to own it, for example. It
really took me by surprise how much all that cr@p still persists in my
way of thinking. Maybe I'm human after all ...