I dunno about a brain trust, Ted, maybe it's a lot of brains on overload!
ted nightshade wrote on Tue, 13 July 2004 16:31 |
This transfer issue plagues my atavistic distrust of digital- Will what's going out from device A really arrive in good order at device B? Will the digital signal suffer from being transferred? I live in fear... the basic promise of digital is that the signal can and will make it through basic unity operations fully intact.
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Your paranoia is based on good logic, but fortunately, the SPDIF and AES/EBU interconnects work, most of the time. There is no fancy error checking and this is a pity, but most times it's either working or it's not, there's no in between. So you can usually tell right away that there's a problem.
When there is a problem, one symptom encountered is a complete loss of lock, which reminds me of the slogan "death is nature's way of telling you to slow down."
For me a complete loss of lock is far better than the more dangerous and subtle problem, manifested by tiny clicks in the sound, which probably represent phase locked loops on the threshold of unlock. Happens around here whenever I repatch the input to one of my boxes without power cycling the box afterward. It's predictable, the mechanism for its cause is known, so it's just an annoyance, not a work-stopper.
There are diagnostic tools for AES/EBU, and like any well-kept professional studio in the analog days, having the right tools around, like an eye-pattern checker in the tool locker would not be a bad thing. You know, though, I don't own one; I could build one, but fortunately, the bottom line is the number of times we meet up with one of the above problems in a working studio is pretty infrequent. Usually substitution of a cable, or just plugging and unplugging or power-cycling clear up 99% of the problems we encounter. Are interconnect problems more frequent in the digital age than the old hum and noise problems we had with analog? I think not, so actually I think digital has been an improvement in that respect. Plug and play, plug and play.
So, take a deep breath, make clean, short connections with good short cables, and relax, the risks are low and the world isn't coming to an end (yet).
Eventually AES/EBU will be replaced by wider bandwidth systems such as Firewire, yet another connector designed to pull out at a drop of a hat. Count your blessings.
BK