Although there is a mod to bypass the preamps in the behringer octopre that allows a fairly decent conversion...its the stinking preamp channels these guys use that is pure harshness)

 
For the money, the ADA-8000 really isn't too bad...
The noise-floor is actually lower than the original Digimax. 
 
BTW, The reason why so many folks use Behringer...
It's cheap (that can be good/bad depending on your perspective)

Jim Roseberry


 
For the money, the ADA-8000 really isn't too bad...
The noise-floor is actually lower than the original Digimax. 
       

Yo, even on GearSlutz the consensus seems to be that the ADA-8000 is pretty awesome for the money (have a look at the numerous Behringer vs. Slutty Brand blind tests). 

Jim Roseberry

Although there is a mod to bypass the preamps in the behringer octopre that allows a fairly decent conversion...its the stinking preamp channels these guys use that is pure harshness)

 
For the money, the ADA-8000 really isn't too bad...
The noise-floor is actually lower than the original Digimax. 
 
BTW, The reason why so many folks use Behringer...
It's cheap (that can be good/bad depending on your perspective)

Yep, I have an ADA-8000 myself and it performs pretty good.  All the converter chips are Alesis and it's probably based on an Alesis reference design.  Just one gain pot per channel, so not much to get wrong there I guess.

I suppose I should have qualified some of that...being a bit of a "modder" myself...(I've built a R.E.D.D. 47, helped design Mohogs 1176, built a few Neves and API's)...

The ADA-8k (I have one in the closet) is certainly much better than what I started out with (mAudio unit>>>>Delta 1010>>>>Echo Something>>>>Motu Fire-thingy>>>Lynx/Prism/Apogee stuff right now...)

Certainly better sounding that a lot of Digi crassness...

Its just you cannot bypass the incredibly inferior/noisy/blanket preamp section unless you mod the Unit...

Over-all A/D has reached a sort of plateau now-a-days that is stellar compared to 10-15 yeas ago...so just about any plug-n-play unit has better chips than we were running years back...

So unless you really want to beef up to some Wolfson chipset or run Burr Brown stuff...your A/D is going to be pretty darn ok...and in my opinion...the place that gets trashed is in design where there is no way to bypass a very second rate pre-amp channel...which they all seem to have some kind of mud mix as part of the design...

Between that and not clearing the isolation barrier for the PSU's the STN ratio is a bit of a distraction...Mackie stuff is spec'd out pretty good on STN...but if you actually listen to it, the noise is unbearable...its not the chips...its the rest of the design...

Cheap power supplies...ridiculous grounding schemes... noisy components...cheap pots...etc...these are the things that don't show up on a signal to noise spec sheet....

But yeah...still much much better than the crapola we were running 10 years ago...

How 'bout a vintage Tapco emulation.

> Yep, I have an ADA-8000 myself and it performs pretty good. All the converter chips are Alesis and it's probably based on an Alesis reference design. Just one gain pot per channel, so not much to get wrong there I guess.

I had ADA-8000 for 3 years. There was nothing wrong with the converters and preamps were OK, too. PSU was the weakest part of the unit - it broke after three years.

At the same time my Apogee converters have been working perfectly for the last 10 years, two RME Firefaces 7 years in the same environment.