Registered: 02/19/00
Posts: 1
Loc: Seattle, WA USA
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Hi Roger- I've been enjoying your columns for years. Thanks for sharing your talents. I've got a question regarding spdif. My setup is a mackie 32x8 that I'll mix on and route that to an Apogee 1000 that uv22s to a Panasonic 3800. Sometimes to save time (and the client $), I'll mix to dat and take the spdif out of the 3800 to my Audiomedia II on my mac on the same mix pass. Is there any sonic degradation by passing the digital signal thru the 3800 to the computer. I have really heard anything strange but I usually don't do it on critical projects. It does save a generation dub. Ideally, I'd get a digital patchbay. And I noticed on another topic that your rigged a Ethernet patchbay. What's the wiring diagram for spdif to ethernet? AES to ethernet? Thanks again!
Looping through one machine to another will not change the sound at all. It will be exactly the same as making the copy digitally after you have printed the mix. The only drawback is if the DAT machine drops out of record for some reason, it will interrupt the signal to the computer. If you used a ZSystems de-tangler yoou could rout to both in parallel so that if the DAT machine dropped out of record the signal would still get to the computer.
The Ethernet patchbay works the best with AES signals because they are ballanced and somewhat immune to external interference. spdif is single ended and touchier. You can NOT mult AES or SPDIF signals with a patchbay to rout one signal to many places. The signal is not designed to feed more than one device at a time. The ZSystems box has electronics that duplicate the signal to send to multiple sources so the sending device thinks it is feeding only one device.
In some cases you can use the Canare AES/ SPDIF transformers to change an AES signal to an SPDIF signal. I use these to get in and out of my Audiomedia III card. The transformer only changes the voltage level and impedence, not the flags and data. The Panasonic DAT will not record an SPDIF signal that appears on the AES input. The Panasonic checks the flags to see what flavor the signal is.
