about the spdif toslink on the g5

[billy the kid]

How will these be able to be used? Are these similar to the adat toslink were i can send 8 tracks in at a time. If so where do i sign. Or is it just a stereo track.
What i want to know is can these be used to record multiple tracks at once? If so how many?

[Slim Shady]

It is Optical S/PDIF only which is a 2 channel format, it's not ADAT compatible. Also, you won't be able to use it with protools at all, but if you use other coreaudio based applications I'm sure it will be selectable as an input.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

The difference can be clarified.. there is no ADAT Toslink protocol.. Digi products like the 001 and 002 support both ADAT Lightpipe and SPDIF optical... which are 2 different digital protocols.. the Mac G5's have Digital Toslink SPDIF connectors(2 channels). Toslink is just the connector type, not the protocol.

Rail

[H E A D W E R K ' N]

Apparently the Optical Out supports surround sound formats, but then of course Dolby Digital and DTS are simply matrixed stereo tracks, not 6 discrete channels. I don't suppose Apple will be realtime software Dolby encoding into MacOSX 10.3?

Also, the optical in supports externally clocked sources up to 96KHz, but internally only up to 48KHz, which is the ceiling on the optical out too. Bit weird. I was kinda hoping Apple would duplicate what the SGI Octanes have had for years (ie. a pair of TOSLINKs supporting ADAT and S/PDIF.

[Vaphoron]

I think the real question should be, what application are they expectiing to need surround sound for? The DVD player would be the only one that I could think of. That would be great if they added system sounds in surround. Right as you computer starts to crash there can be wacky sounds going all around you to drive you nuts.

[espron]

Dolby Digital and DTS are simply matrixed stereo tracks, not 6 discrete channels.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Actually, dolby digital IS 6 discrete channels, but they are all encoded into a single AC-3 stream which can be transferred using a single optical or coaxial spdif connection.

Espen