Thunderbolt 3 length

[melodydetective]

Sort of a cross post. What are people using to connect Thunderbolt 3 interfaces to their ProTools computer if it’s not in the same room? Anyone using Corning fiber optic cables? Anyone using Thunderbolt 2 fiber optic with an adapter from 3 on their interface?

[JFreak]

There are two things here.

First, fibre is abnostic. It does not care what happens on either end. It is just as stable to have one feet fibre or thousand feet fibre.

Second, the converters. Whatever you use are pretty much always unique to your system. Data stream is converted from source to something, then transferred via fibre, then converted to something else.

Just pick your best guess and test it throughly before going live.

[melodydetective]

Originally Posted by JFreak

There are two things here.

First, fibre is abnostic. It does not care what happens on either end. It is just as stable to have one feet fibre or thousand feet fibre.

Good to hear that repeated. If you mean “length-agnostic”. That’s been my experience so far with extending Thunderbolt 2. The most important thing with that turned out to be “Make sure the connections do not overheat.” Solved that on each end with a small fan.

Originally Posted by JFreak

Just pick your best guess and test it throughly before going live.

That’s always a good rule. Just hoping that if anyone else has literally done this that it might narrow some things down, so I asked, because things are always different in practice. If anyone has, please post your experiences.

[JFreak]

yes, that abnostic was a typo

[JFreak]

Asked for a propellerhead friend of mine. You can safely run 4 kilometers of fibre without needing another active device. So if you run into a trouble, it is the conversion.

[dominicperry]

I'm not sure what's going on here, but there are very much different kinds of fibre, and different kinds of transceivers. Some fibre is plastic, some is glass. There are different tranmission widths within the fibres, and there are multimode and single mode transceivers.
What this means for Thunderbolt extension, I'm not sure. But treating it as all the same is not correct. Some fibre is for short runs, some is for long runs. And you need to choose the right transceivers for the fibre type and the distance you are running.

Dominic

[JFreak]

^ true. but best chance for a trouble lies in conversion, a.k.a. transceivers

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

There are two things here.

First, fibre is abnostic. It does not care what happens on either end. It is just as stable to have one feet fibre or thousand feet fibre.

Second, the converters. Whatever you use are pretty much always unique to your system. Data stream is converted from source to something, then transferred via fibre, then converted to something else.

Just pick your best guess and test it throughly before going live.

First, no it's not.

This is not how Thunderbolt optical cables work. The optical transceiver hardware is built into the end of these specialized Thunderbolt optical cables (similar to how transceivers are built into longer Thunderbolt copper cable connectors.. and why longer Thunderbolt copper cables are so expensive). These are extremely specific cables, none of which you get to change, it's all so sensitive, you should never be splicing these or trying to run over other fiber cables.

[JFreak]

^ also true. Which proves my point, you can safely ignore fibre and all you need to take care of is the conversion

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by melodydetective

Anyone using Thunderbolt 2 fiber optic with an adapter from 3 on their interface?

How *exactly* do you have stuff connected? No I'm not wasting my time reading multiple cross posted threads.

How are you powering the TB2/TB3 adapter ? What adapter exactly are you using? If you are using an Apple adapter upstream from the optical cable that is not going to work since it needs power from the host side... which an optical cable cannot supply.

Why are you stepping between TB2 and TB3 to start with? Sounds like maybe you just need to put the TB2/TB3 adapter upstream of the optical cable and run the USB-C connectors through a device with two Thunderbolt-3 connectors if needed (like a dock, but don't use a Thunderbolt 4 hub). And no, a dock likely cannot provide the correct upstream power, you solve the TB2/TB3 adapter power problem by connecting it electrically to the host computer.