MAC PRO DIGITAL I/O AND CLOCKING

[Marrone]

HI!!

I was sooo sick and tired waiting for a PCI express solution that i was constantly looking for a temporary solution. I was about to buy a M-audio firewire interface or whatever when it suddenly hit me........I have optical ports on my Mac Pro!! De reason why i had never thought about this is because the on-board soundcards use to really suck. You would have latencies from 150 ms and up. i remember when i first started in audio a loooong time ago and i started making music and record on my laptop and did not understand why there was so much latency. When i find out why this was (because internal cards suck and had no asio at the time of course) i bought my first soundcard and never looked back. But now in desparate times i thought..what the heck lets try. I was amazed!! No latency with midi and AU. Even on the lowest buffer settings! Internal soundcards have made a big leap the last 10 years! But now i am wondering...

Can i just hook up my converters through SPDIF (with a SPDIF Coax to SPDIF Toslink converter) and record at 88.2? Also how can i set the Mac to clock off my converters? Furthermore i am wondering? If you do not record more than 2 Channels at the time why would you still buy a Seperate soundcard? Would the seperate soundcard have even better latency? I am only using my MAC's digital I/O's. Can anyone help me with these questions? Thanks!!

[panther]

Ditto,

I would appreciate a response to this myself....

[Marrone]

No audio expert having a answer on this?

[Matt Fudge]

Originally Posted by Marrone

HI!!
Can i just hook up my converters through SPDIF (with a SPDIF Coax to SPDIF Toslink converter) and record at 88.2? Also how can i set the Mac to clock off my converters? Furthermore i am wondering? If you do not record more than 2 Channels at the time why would you still buy a Seperate soundcard? Would the seperate soundcard have even better latency? I am only using my MAC's digital I/O's. Can anyone help me with these questions? Thanks!!

Far from being an expert but I can give you my experience with the optical in on my Macbook Pro. I have a Sonic Solutions AD converter that I connect from it's TOS-link out into the Macbook pro's minijack optical in. This allows you to record two channels at up to 96kHz, if you want more than two channels you need to get another device but luckily you can aggregeate them with Apple's Audio MIDI. If you are using the Digital in's on your Mac it should clock to it automatically, the sample rate inside Audio MIDI setup follows the sample rate selector on the front of my converter. As for a seperate soundcard, like I said, it would allow you to have more than two channels at a time in and out as well as I would imagine it would have better latency. I've not done anything extensive with this yet so I can't report on latency but I have heard others saying on the board that it's not that it's not too great.