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.
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.
In terms of i/o capability, the specs of the Madiface XT would work well for the purposes I'm proposing.
But the point is that I want open source drivers, and open source hardware! I don't want to depend on the health and the priorities of a commercial entity. I want to be able to inspect the driver software and contribute towards perfecting it!
Compared to, say, GPUs, the needs of multichannel digital audio i/o are modest and not changing very much over time.
> If I'm not mistaken the underlying transport protocol
Some quick usage of Wikipedia suggest that you are, sadly, mistaken. ADAT lightpipe seems to use a completely different protocol (more capable?), and while S/PDIF and AES/EBU use quite similar protocols, they differ in impedance and max and min voltages, so I'm guessing that directly electrically connecting the two controllers is a bad idea for both the controller and the data.
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
In terms of i/o capability, the specs of the Madiface XT would work well for the purposes I'm proposing.
But the point is that I want open source drivers, and open source hardware! I don't want to depend on the health and the priorities of a commercial entity. I want to be able to inspect the driver software and contribute towards perfecting it!
Compared to, say, GPUs, the needs of multichannel digital audio i/o are modest and not changing very much over time.
> If I'm not mistaken the underlying transport protocol
Some quick usage of Wikipedia suggest that you are, sadly, mistaken. ADAT lightpipe seems to use a completely different protocol (more capable?), and while S/PDIF and AES/EBU use quite similar protocols, they differ in impedance and max and min voltages, so I'm guessing that directly electrically connecting the two controllers is a bad idea for both the controller and the data.
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