Comment by rectang
6 years ago
What exists as far as open source digital audio interfaces? Meaning only digital i/o — no analog.
It seems like a relatively contained problem to take multiple streams of PCM audio into a computer, locked to word clock. Then the hard, fiddly aspects of analog design can be left to high-quality outboard converters which speak MADI or whatever.
I say "contained" because I don't want to minimize the difficulty of getting such a design right, but it seems like you only have to get it right once.
Is USB not sufficient?
What I'm looking for is a way to hook up any converter which outputs via a standard digital audio protocol (SPIDF, AES/EBU, ADAT lightpipe, etc.).
Then we don't need a USB driver for each converter! We only need one USB driver, for the digital i/o interface. And we can polish the driver for that one interface until it's actually reliable, instead of relying on the sketchy one-off driver for this year's soon-to-be-obsolete USB audio interface.
ETA: Many such converters (most of them high-end) listed here: https://www.sweetwater.com/c796--AD_DA_Converters
> SPIDF, AES/EBU, ADAT lightpipe, etc.
If I'm not mistaken the underlying transport protocol is the same for all of those - you can get a coaxial to XLR to get S/PDIF into an AES port or a coaxial to TOSLink converter to get S/PDIF data into an ADAT port.
You can look into the Madiface XT maybe ? https://www.rme-audio.de/hdspe-madi-fx.html or the other RME products which have enough digital I/O to cover a lot of needs
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