VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[bobfromboulder]

So I ran across this little tidbit the other day: all new macs (at least, mac mini's and macbooks/macbook pro's) have audio I/O ports that are BOTH optical and minijacks, except the Mac Pros, which have a separate TOSLINK.

The significance of this is that fiber cables do not distort or lose signal over long lengths and are immue to other forms of electromagnetic interference, like just about everything associated with your computer - power cables, ethernet cables, video cables, monitors (CRT's in particular).

So this has got me thinking; are there any reasonably priced (or otherwise!) mixers/amps/etc that can take a mic input and output a digital signal via a TOSLINK?

The trick is, you need a special cable with TOSLINK -> minijack adapters like this:
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/audio_toslink_cables.html#adt
or
http://creativemac.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=47126
(third pic down)

[Yoda117]

what's your definition of reasonable?

There's stuff in pretty much all price ranges (at the least from $350 and u that support this standard.

And I wouldn't worry about it being Mac only. My soon to be 4y.o. laptop (used primarily as a mobile malware "zoo") has this ability too. For those interested, check your specs to see if it's supported.
_________________
Voiceovers by Gregory Houser
Philadelphia based Voice Actor

Blog - A man, a martini, and a lot of microphones

[Edo]

There's a nice company in my country that ships just about anywhere... they have all sorts of smart stuff to interconnect between SP/dif and optical... lots of converters and formats there... too much to list here... I am in no way involved with them other than ordering stuff from them in the past years. Very good service if needed...

Check them out at http://www.sfb.net