I felt a need to dispell the following comments. However, there's no real supporting evidence of that on their web page, and I'm not familiar with anyone who has ever had the guts to try these guys out- but there you go. One other possibility: Hosa (yes, them!) makes a manual patchbay that is supposed to do lightpipe. The simpler switchers like the Fostex and Midiman products don't do that- and in the case of the Midiman, Bruce Valeriani discovered that his 24-bit data was actually being truncated to 16 bits on the way through the patchbay. You need some hardware in there to regenerate the data, reync it with the clock you extract from it, and send it out the other end cleanly. So you really can't just take the signal from a receiver, run it through a crosspoint switch, and send it out a transmitter, and still have decent clock stability and bit error rates.

The ADAT interface is cranked right up to its limits with wide/high-rate data, due to the limitations of the extremely cheap TOSLINK hardware (the transmitter-reciever are being used right at the limits of their design specs). I'd bet that it's a Rosendahl piece, by the look of that faceplate.īottom line, as I see it: you get what you pay for here. Steinberg also offers a unit that offers high-rate digital patchbay functionality for Nuendo: Don't know anything about the Nuendo piece, other than the fact that Steinberg never build anything themselves- so it is a rebadged product OEM'ed from someone else. So the Z-sys piece is the leading candidate these days, IMNSHO: except Fostex, who finally took any mention of ADAT _off_their page web page. All of them lie like dogs on their spec pages.

Not the Fostex, not the Digipatch, *only* the Z-sys. I did quite a bit of research on digital patchbays a while back, and found out that *none* of them except the Z-sys Z8.8a will actually do >16bit lightpipe.

Steinberg nuendo rme dd8