Poof! Audio quality into your Mac as high as 24-bit, 96 kHz! Plug this into ANY Mac and the port switches from analog to digital. However, there’s a special TOSlink adapter that turns a standard 1/8-inch miniplug into a hollow tube that light shines through. If you plug in standard audio plugs, the ports become analog.
The Microphone In and Headset Out ports of ALL Macs support BOTH optical and copper signals (digital and analog). This created a fully-digital signal path from final signal processing in the Compellor to broadcast - IF we could get it into the Mac. We added a short length of fiber optic cable to go from the Hosa to the back of the Mac. That converts the digital signals carried over copper wire to digital signals carried over fibre. The conversion is done using the Hosa S/PDIF Optical to AES/EBU Digital Audio Interface. Then, we would convert the AES signals to TOSlink and connect them into the back of the iMac. At this point, Wayne told me that I was wrong – they were just hidden.īecause we would be running cables in a high traffic area, we decided to use AES copper cable - it looks like standard XLR mic cable, but manufactured to higher standards - from the audio rack to the streaming server. However, as I was streaming from an Intel iMac, I didn’t think I had S/PDIF optical connections. We were setting up the studio gear for our NAB coverage and I was planning on outputting the final signal as analog from the 320D Compellor into the streaming server. I learned about this in talking with Wayne La Farr, product specialist for Aphex. NOTE: S/PDIF optical and TOSlink are two words that mean the same thing. And, as you can see below, it uses a square plug to connect to the gear. Basically, it transmits digital signals between devices using fiber optic cables. TOSlink was originally created by Toshiba to connect their CD players. Its most common use is in consumer audio equipment (via a “digital optical” socket), where it carries a digital audio stream between components such as MiniDisc and CD players and DAT recorders.” It’s called TOSlink.Īccording to Wikipedia, “TOSLINK or Optical Cable is a standardized optical fiber connection system. I didn’t discover it until we started our technical preparation for NAB this year.
]ĭid you know there’s a fiber optic connnection built into every Mac? [ This article was first published in the April, 2010, issue of
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