FoxTick

Hell no! A lot goes into truly professional gear having nothing to do with the sound quality. Plus high-end gear does sound excellent. Besides raw fidelity, which is not difficult to achieve these days, there's also build quality, features, stability, reliability, quality of the drivers, and more. A real studio like, say, Universal records 80-piece orchestras that cost thousands of dollars per hour. They're not going to dick around which cheap crap that might break at the worst time. If a Behringer DI costs $30 and a Radial or whatever costs $200, they'll gladly pay the $200 every time without blinking. --Ethan Sure... I know you say that "stacking" is flawed, but I don't think I'm way off base here. Speaking from experience -- anything that I've ever recorded with high-end gear has always been easier to mix. I'm talking about rock & roll/metal type stuff. I don't think it has as much to do with the sound of one individual track, but more with how all the tracks play together. As a whole, everything has more dimension and punch when tracked with anything considered "pro" --- this is what I was talking about when I mentioned "accumulative effect" --- so, I'm still curious as to how multiple tracks from each converter would sound. Especially with music that's more willing to exploit the sonic limitations of said converters.

So, you mean to tell me that Metric Halo, Apogee, Lavry, Prism, Lynx, et al. have been selling "snake oil" this whole time?

Well, {censored} me running. I can't tell the difference between a $25 sound card and a $6000 Apogee. (BTW, what does Apogee make that costs $6k?) But this is just one single track. You don't notice a lot of difference. But what if you're tracking a whole band? I'm curious to hear 16 channels of $25 sound card vs. 16 channels of Apogee. I bet there's a greater difference when you consider clock stability (or lack thereof) and accumulative effect of multiple channels. FWIW - I think #2 is the Apogee. At least that's what my mid-grade playback chain tells me in an untreated living room....who am I fooling? I really can't tell - the man with the cat has me stumped