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[hnewman]

curious to know what people use / recommend for getting in and back out of the box?  

assuming here that one starts with a digital source, feeds it out (spdif or aes/ebu) to analog processing, brings it back into the box (spdif or aes/ebu), and monitors from the box? (another spdif or aes/ebu)

i know that their are monitoring routers that might circumvent the need for the second out, but at any rate my first question stands ;;; PCI cards?  lynx or rme?   are the pro-sumer cards bad news?

[TotalSonic]

I think you'll find most if not all ME's use dedicated AD and DA converters with AES i/o.  Lavry, Apogee, Mytek, dcs, Prism and Benchmark are all commonly used converters for mastering tasks.

Lynx's AES 16 is certainly a good choice for a mastering DAW rig me - http://www.lynxstudio.com/aes16.html .  I think RME also makes excellent cards.

fwiw - For my own DAW's I have one with an older Lynx One card for it's AES i/o along with an inexpensive Terratec Phase 22 for additional spdif i/o - and then another box with Sydec's Mixtreme 192 which has TDIF i/o but can send out to an external TDIF to AES converter box.  Both get sent to a Z-Sys 8.8 digital detangler which sends out to Lavry Blue DAC's and returns from a Mytek Stereo96 ADC.  CD player, DAT and Minidisc all get sent to the Z-sys patch bay via spdif.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[Ronny]

RME 9636 and 9652 busmaster cards. Optical going in and out of PC. I mainly use PC for editing and burning cd's though. I've had the cards for 5 years now, never had any problems.

[hnewman]

The detangler looks like it would go a long way to solving my problem, but I think what I want to do is almost too basic for that.

I need to feed two digital outs simultaneously (one for my analog insert chain, one for monitoring) -- a card either of those suggested above seem both to be on the right track.  The catch is that in my current arrangement, my DAW has no standard PCI slots left and lives in a machine room.  I'm wondering if I can get away with using something external, say a pair of MOTU 828's or Mbox's (thus can run firewire cables to my desk instead of long aes/ebu lines.)    Keeping in mind this is JUST for the digital i/o, I'm not touching their onboard converters at all (myteks feed the in and out of the insert line, hoping to put a benchmark dac-1 in for monitoring.)

This is probably me being shortsighted, but I don't imagine needing  more than a pair of digital i/o's anytime soon (I do a little bit of outboard digital processing, but right now I run those boxes inline with the analog gear, between the mytek ADC and the DAW.)

Many thanks for your input.