Curious about this device as it is a bit unusual offering for a company like AVA. (Which I typically attribute to bread-n-butter products like amps, pre-amps and DACs -- and not exotics, per se!!)
Is the A2D meant to digitize tape or vinyl for storage onto HDD?
How is it different to typical/popular A/D devices like Focusrite, RME (Babyface) interfaces?
What's inside the A2D? A peek under the hood and what A/D chip is used would be cool!
Thanks!
The A2D exists for one purpose: to deliver the highest quality analog-to-digital conversion for people using digital preamplifiers (i.e., a DAC connected directly to power amps). To that end, it doesn't have anything it doesn't need. This means it doesn't have a USB interface, which is typically what you'd use to rip analog streams to your computer. Instead, the A2D's digital output is a transformer-coupled, coaxial S/PDIF jack. It won't take up the precious USB input on your DAC.
The A2D is different from things like Focusrite's Scarlet series and the RME Babyface in a few important ways. The first of these we've already covered: the digital interface is coaxial S/PDIF, not USB.
Second, Scarlets, Babyfaces, and similar devices are designed to both encode and decode audio for prosumer music production. This means they have a DAC built into them alongside the ADC, very often on the same IC (a so-called CODEC IC). With the A2D, we weren't burdened by the need for a DAC. As a result, we were able to select the best analog-to-digital converter for the application without consideration of anything else.
Third, the A2D's signal conditioning has been carefully engineered to work with single-ended -10 dBV consumer-level inputs. As a rule, prosumer audio interfaces place their priority on supporting balanced +4 dBu inputs. On many of these devices we've examined, the performance on single-ended inputs suffers measurably.
I hope this answers your questions!
