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[HankBrice]

A question for all the digital gurus out there.  

I'm contemplating getting an RME card with optical connections to my AD16X and DA16 to run a Logic setup on a new G5.

I'd like to put the computer 10m away in the machine room if possible.

If I run plastic Toslink cable over that distance from the card to the DA but clock the DA with word clock from the AD16X, would that eliminate any jitter coming down the Toslink cable?

Would the same jitter issue go away on the AD side if I clocked the card from the AD16x using word clock?

Is there any risk of interface jitter or distortional rounding of the squarewaves due to reflections, etc as a result of that plastic cable or does the cable only cause a gain reduction (optical, not audio obviously)?

Thanks very much in advance!

[Ronny]

HankBrice wrote on Tue, 26 April 2005 21:48

A question for all the digital gurus out there.   I'm contemplating getting an RME card with optical connections to my AD16X and DA16 to run a Logic setup on a new G5. I'd like to put the computer 10m away in the machine room if possible. If I run plastic Toslink cable over that distance from the card to the DA but clock the DA with word clock from the AD16X, would that eliminate any jitter coming down the Toslink cable? Would the same jitter issue go away on the AD side if I clocked the card from the AD16x using word clock? Is there any risk of interface jitter or distortional rounding of the squarewaves due to reflections, etc as a result of that plastic cable or does the cable only cause a gain reduction (optical, not audio obviously)? Thanks very much in advance!

I don't have any trouble running RME ADAT and SPdif optical at 10 meters with outboard masterclock, or running the clock over the optical lines without BNC. In any case I wouldn't exceed the manufacturers recommendations. If you need to go farther, just get a booster hub. A while back I bought some of those little couplers that connect two lightpipes together. To test out if they'd lose signal, I connected five 2 meter lightpipes together and and it worked fine, that was clocking 10 meters over the 5 lightpipes, without BNC hooked up. I would have expected the couplers to rob some of the light and be worse than just running one long pipe, but there were no audible differences. Can't say that about some Toslink splitters that I bought, those things didn't work at all, made in Taiwan, must have been designed in China. The couplers surprised me how well they worked, I ordered them from sysconcept in Canada.