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Topic: Toslink.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 11-11-2008 03:55 AM
Tristan,
I don't think S/PDIF would do it either; it's only rated at 10 metres, and I think my estimate of 35 metres may be a bit under. I probably need to allow for 40 metres to be on the safe side.
Mark,
It's for a show next year in a theatre/concert/multi-purpose type venue. There is need to get audio from a laptop on a lectern on stage into the sound system. The laptop offers two outputs, unbalanced analogue which is quite noisy, and Toslink. I haven't seen the venue yet, but I'm told that they can take AES in both balanced and ubalanced form. There are XLR cables from stage dips up to the sound box, and also 75 Ohm co-ax which was put in many years ago for composite video, but has never been used.
The performer on stage needs to be able to play clips of pre-recorded audio in response to the audience, and speed is important, cueing somebody on the desk to play the clips would cause a delay.
The other way that I thought of doing it was to play the clips from a computer in the sound box, and make a remote desktop connection to this to control it from the laptop in the stage, but there is no network cabling installed. Taking a long length of Cat-5 around the walls would be a possible, as would using a wireless network, but I'd rather avoid that one if possible.
It looks like the best options would be to convert from Toslink to one form or the other of AES and send that up over the existing cabling, or run an Ethernet cable up and remote control the machine playing the clips.
[ 11-11-2008, 06:54 AM: Message edited by: Stephen Furley ]
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 11-12-2008 07:01 AM
Phil's suggestion might be an option, but I find the analogue outputs on most laptops are noisy; I think a lot of it comes from the display circuitry, that's why I wanted to use the Toslink output, it tends to be cleaner. I suppose taking the Toslink and converting it to analogue on a decent balanced line might be an option.
Steve, that HR-UDC1 box you pointed to looks interesting, I can think of several places where I could have used one of those in the last couple of years or so. Digital audio's getting a lot more common now, it was all analogue when I worked in A/V, but that was quite some years ago now.
It's a pity that it doesn't provide analogue inputs and outputs as well, then it could interface just about anything, but a HR-DAC1 would do that, and the two would mount quite nicely side by side. It's also a pity that it won't take 240V, that means yet another mains adapter to cart around.
The other problem is that I can't find any British distributor for it, or indeed any mention of it on a British site search in Google. It is CE marked, so it should be possible for it to be sold in the EU. There's a 'phone number in Holland, but I don't speak Dutch. I might try calling the American number and ask if they have a distributor here.
On an American site the HR-UDC1 was about $600, not the cheapest converter around, but not impossibly expensive, and not too bad for the spec. The cheaper converters that I've looked at don't handle all four interfaces, so it would take two or more converters to do the same job.
Something else that I'd find useful is a device to bridge digital audio over Ethernet. We have peenty of bandwidth available, including Gigabit to remote sites, and various forms of QoS on our switches. We don't have any problems sending CCTV, or hundreds of voice calls over Ethernet, so it should be possible.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 11-13-2008 03:03 PM
Steve,
Thanks for the info. The telephone number you give is the one in Holland, which is listed on RDLs website. When I scrolled further down the home page there was a link to international distributors which I hadn't noticed before. There are two British ones listed. The first of these has a website which lists various makes of equipment which they sell, but there's no mention at all of RDL, and no answer on their 'phone number. The other is right at the opposite end of the country. They also have a website, which does list some RDL equipment, though much of it seems to be different to that listed on RDLs own site. The 'Half-Rack' range, including the HR-UDC1 and the HR-DAC1 is completely missing. There are two somewhat similar devices in a 'Rack-Up' range, but it's not just a question of different enclosures, the specs are also different, and not as good as the 'HR' devices. I might give RDL themselves a call, and see what they say.
The list price you quote is the highest I've seen from various distributors in the US; the lowest I've seen is something like 30% lower.
I try to avoid 'Wall wart' type adapters, in favour of ones which tale a standard IEC mains lead. There are two reasons for this, firstly the wall wart type are generally too big to be able to fit more than two in a standard British 4-way mains block, so it's generally better to use something with a standard mains plug on the end. Secondly, it's easy to just swap the mains lead if it needs to be used in a different country.
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