Comment by jcelerier
6 years ago
> 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.
It doesn't matter for the purposes I'm investigating. So long as we can get the bits out of the wire and into open source software, we can make sense of them.
(Licensing could be a concern though if ADAT lightpipe is proprietary — I'm not clear on that. But then we could just use other open protocols instead.)