"soundcard" with many SP/DIF inputs

Gear talk
#1

Hi everybody,

I find myself in the situation, that quite some of my hardware devices actually HAVE digital outputs (SP/Dif optical or coax), but my soundcard has only one input/out put digital. As my legacy HD-Recorder as well. I can understand that it looked ok at the time to have only one digital input 20 years ago, but my new Focusrite USB interface has only one digital input (besides adat) as well. I am looking for a soundcard/adapter that can take more (4? 6? 8?) SP/DIF inputs and make them available in my computer (read: DAW). I was checking the online stores, but was not able to identify a device like that.

Do you have any hint for me? Am I the only one who would like to keep the hardware connected digital?

thank you
Reinald

#2

This is possible, but expensive. Look for something like this.

#3

This was something that used to be way more popular

If higher than cd quality isn’t important you can pick stuff like this up pretty cheap (or very expensive if the seller is crazy)

#4

Just use balanced cables instead?

#5

Yeah, I think @6581punk has a point there. If your device has a digital output, it very likely has pretty decent D/A convertors for its analogue outputs as well. A single roundtrip to analogue really isn’t going to have much meaningful impact on audio quality at all so you can save yourself a lot of money and trouble by just using good balanced cables instead of trying to buy yet another interface.

#6

The difficult thing having many digital inputs is which one are you going to sync to and how are all the other devices going to sync to the master. On more proffesional stuff you’ll find word clock connectors as well as digital input connectors . You need to loop back a sync signal to get a complex routing with digital audio connections working right.

#7

The D/A is often part of the character of the synth. If it has a bad D/A then you can use an external DAC via the digital out anyway.

There’s plenty of audio interfaces with balanced inputs.