"The Neural Loudness Processor isn't a multi-band processor at all; it's a loudness processor," explains Day. "It speaks to how the ear hears. It's processing is set to be sensitive to critical bands, ERB's, in your ear. About 600 radio stations and about 2,000 TV stations in the U.S. are using it right now.

After going through the NLC5.1ST, the feed went to a Day Sequerra DTS Downmix Surround Encoder, and then via Telos Zephyr Xstream (ISDN) to Colorado Public Radio.

All the digital units were clocked via an external Rosendahl word clock using BNC coax connectors. The Rosendahl clocked the Grace 802 units, the Day Sequerra units and the NMC DMI-8.

"What we've found is that jitter is the defining factor in digital audio quality," says Pappas. "Especially once you start getting into the A/D conversion process, if you have a lot of jitter going on at that point, there's nothing that fixes that later. You're stuck. Early on we figured that out, and decided we wouldn't buy anything that had anything greater than 500 picoseconds of jitter in the audio passband. Most of the stuff we have now runs in the 100 range."

In addition to broadcasting, Pappas and his team recorded the concert in both PCM, via Logic on a Mac, and in Direct Stream Digital (DSD). The DS-00 sent one stream to an EMM Labs Digital-to-Analog converter, then to a Genex 9048 for DSD recording.

Horgan is a freelance writer based in Denver.