In Reply to: Re: QSx ADAT outputs posted by sam on October 27, 1999 at 01:44:21:
thanks sam...
it is pretty much as i suspected. the cable and the port on the md are both described as toslink (which also seems to appear on some other audio stuff from time to time). i took a chance since the cable spec appears to be the same and got a toslink cable hoping to find an adat person (person with an adat) to have had some experience with it. oddly enough, though i know some pretty aggressive adat (deck) users no one has ever tried plugging a qs in directly. i was depressed vowing that next i was in a studio i would say, "hey, mind if i plug this in?" ...andy
: QS (like most Alesis stuff) has ADAT lightpipe outs, and supports a protocol with 8 channels (though the QS only uses 4 for the mains and auxes). If your minidisk has the same connector it's almost certainly sp/dif (that's sony/philipps digital interface format) which is an incompatible 2 channel format. I believe there are a couple of moderately priced format converters, thought I don't know much about them. BTW, sp/dif is implemented on either optical or electrical (rca) connectors, and you won't generally 'accidentally' get gear with ADAT lightpipe I/O, it's usually on higher end gear, you have to seek it out a bit, and it's generally well marked with the ADAT logo. If you connect digital gear with an incompatible audio signal, you generally get very harsh noise.