Digital cable length -- how long is too long?

7th May 2004	#1
Clueless Lives for gear Joined: Feb 2004 Location: Chapel Hill, NC Posts: 1,918 My Recordings/Credits Thread Starter 3 Reviews written	Digital cable length -- how long is too long? First question: AES/EBU cable length... Looking on the web, it appears there are two types of AES/EBU cable vendors: those that sell a max length of 15' (5m), and those that offer cables claiming to work over 100m. I'm looking at a studio arrangement that will depend on a 6m cable running between some digital EFX (lexicon, eventide) and an Apogee 800. The Apogee will feed my analog mixer. If you had a choice between 6m of digital an 2m of analog, or 1m of digital and 8m of analog, which would you choose, and why? If there's no practical difference, that would be great to know. Second question: audiowire... I have a MOTU HD192. MOTU claim that they have increased the range of their audiowire interface from 15' (5m) to 60' (20m) when they upgraded from the PCI-324 to the PCI-424 cards. Can anybody verify that this claim is true? I'm looking for a 6m run (which should be a piece of cake). Any experience over 5m would be appreciated.

7th May 2004	#2
NeoVXR Lives for gear Joined: Apr 2004 Posts: 1,230	a word from theory: digital cabling does not degrade sound without being noticed. it is a go / no go situation. either you have hard crackles, or you get error messages from your devices, or it simply does not work. with "repeater/refresher" technology (should not have more than 1-3 samples of latency), you can send the signal around the world. you need only consider the loss of AD/DA conversion, if there is any. analog cabling has always some influence on the sound that increases with length. so I think you can experiment without risk, results will be clear and you can buy little devices that make any length possible. but now the practical answers will follow, hopefully... __________________ sorry 4 poor english

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