"David Satz" wrote in message
om
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 tested a number of Sony Discman players and posted the results at

http://www.pcavtech.com/play-rec/summary/index.htm

None of them came close to a Rev E Flying Cow, nor was it a fair comparison
given that the Cow was capable of handling 24 bit data, and any CD player
is limited to less than 16 bits worth of actual performance.


I didn't test the Cow's A/D section.

My tests are for loop-back, so the noise and distortion of both are
represented by one test and one set of performance numbers.