[time-nuts] Sound cards

Lux, James P james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov
Tue Jan 13 21:57:04 UTC 2009


> > The optical link commonly being used for S/P-DIF is TosLink and it
> > seems like it can be the cause of many problems. It seems like some
> > care in doing the optical link setup is needed. I have never digged
> > into why the optical links have that problem. I can only guess, but
> > bad optical coupling seems reasonable. The multimode
> "fiber" seems to
> > be leaving one or two things to ask for.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Magnus
> >
> >
> Hej Magnus
>
> Relatively high jitter being one problem.
> Limited sampling rate being another.
>
> If one has a cheap 16 bit sound card what will it do with 24
> bit data from an external ADC?
>
>

I would imagine that the sound card is just being used as a digital bus interface, and the A/D won't feature into it. Kind of depends on whether the device driver for the sound card accepts anything on the S/PDIF or whether it assumes 16 bits.  I think S/PDIF is 20bits/sample, but there's probably a 24 bit flavor.




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