My Saffire 56 has SPDIF and so does the Lexicon unit I'm looking at buying.

So it's just a case of hooking them up and using the SPDIF as a digital stereo I/O right?

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Yep. 1 cable = 2 channels. Is it coax or optical? If coax, make sure it's actually a SPDIF cable (75ohm) and not just a phono /rca cable.

By the way, some systems (depending on format) only support 20bit with consumer SPDIF. Check the fine print.....

Ok cheers dawg, they're coax both ends but I wasn't entirely sure that the digital stereo over one cable did what I thought it might do. Saves me a pair of inputs for the Lexicon

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quote:

Originally posted by clay i think spdif support 7.2 96khz 24bit (new dts standard?) not sure though, rann should would know id guess. so if you "fool" your devices to think its surround you actually have inputs for 8 mono devices.

As far as I know, you can't do 7.1 via SPDIF. Maybe the brought out a new DTS protocol I'm not aware of, but DTS or Dolby used to be the only two encoding protocols to get 5.1 out of coax.

Also, I've never seen anyone able to fool the system in to using it as extra outputs; the problem is that it has to encode and decode (AC3/DTS/DD etc) in the chosen format at both ends.

I suppose you could use a decoder as the DAC but that seems like an incredibly long winded way to get an extra 3 stereo outputs.

HDMI is something you can fool, as you can output as RGBHV (video) and 7.1 as discrete analogue channels.

SPDIF is also compressed at 5.1 or 7.1 and my understanding is that it's not lossless - it won'r really matter for home surround, but you don't want to produce with that as the analogue channels will obviously be lossless and the others not.

yup

spdif is both a cable and data protocol. 2 PCM or more but compressed. Can't think of any device for production that does 5.1. Your onboard audio uses 20bit most likely. Your device will use 24.

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quote:

Originally posted by clay so surround sound is compressed over the protocoll? i thought it was only compressed to save space on the DVD, not to reduce dataflow in the cable. fuck when will we ever come back to normal cd quality again???

Sadly not. SPDIF doesn't have the throughput for 6 channels of PCM needed to do 5.1 so it only works with AC3 or DTS which are compressed formats. Because they knew that most systems won't have the ability to handle the needed bandwidth for uncompressed 5.1 PCM, the DVD standard was made for only compressed audio, hence why they just encode in AC3/DTS.

I ordered yellow ones.

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