Mx2424 as AES converters via Thunderbolt ? Sure

[BusyBoxSt7]

There are other ways to do this if you're on a windows computer or a mac pro w/ PCIE cards. But if you're on a laptop or some other Mac that only has thunderbolt and USB and just want the simplicity of not transferring files at all, this is one way. It's pretty much this vs. an adat interface for us folks.

I cannot personally verify that this works, though you could verify w/ the manufacturer (Lynx)... It may not be cost effective depending on how many channels you need, where you live, etc.

1) Have an AES card in the Mx2424, of course.
2) Get a PCIE -> thunderbolt chassis. (sonnet or OWC .. make sure you get one with enough slots for the # of channels you need and make sure it fits the correct sized card(s)).
3) Get a Lynx AES16e (or two... or a similar card if someone else does these)
4) install whatever drivers from Lynx (or similar) . Make sure the company who makes the AES card supports using it over thunderbolt.
https://www.lynxstudio.com/downloads/aes16e

NOTE - the lynx may require using their specific 25 -> 26 pin cables, but you'll also have to either buy an adapter from Redco (to get between the yamaha/tascam pinout) or re-solder the head, or order a custom cable to start with from redco or pro audio LA.


WHY would anyone want to do this instead of using toslink/adat? Perhaps you prefer AES over toslink. I'll be soon testing these two against each other (subjectively and with some null test type stuff), by sending the AES to a Lynx Aurora (borrowed). Might be subjective/superstition about the jitters, might not. Perhaps the wordclock cable keeps it clean.
That has not been my experience so far when trying to send spdif over toslink to my DA at least. It's smeared and narrow compared to sending it from an AES jack. And every cable has sounded different. But, different application sort of so who knows.

As I said, it's subjective but perhaps this is a useful idea to someone. If I'm missing some crucial point, let me know. If that silly MOTU 2408 used actual firewire instead of their proprietary cable, that would be an option too, but I get why since Firewire often isn't the most stable connection (disturbed by bus priority on the computer etc).

 

[carausius]

I've got a Lucid 88192 AES converter connected up to 8 channels of the MX2424 which has a SCSI to SATA bridge adaptor & SATA caddy fitted. If you need extra tracks for drum mics ect, the MX2424 converters are more than good enough!

So record & overdub on the MX2424 in tape mode, transfer the tracks using your MX224 caddy drive into a SATA docking station, edit with your DAW software of choice, then mix in the DAW or even transfer back to the MX2424 for mixing through an analog console.

You can use & edit using the same disk drive for MX2424 & your DAW using a SATA caddy & docking station.

That's the cheap way to do it, reliable & easy, even a pair of quality AES converters would be a good setup with the MX2424 if you're not recording bands.

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

The used price of what I suggested is very near the same price (150-250 for pcie chassis, 250-300 for lynx card) as the Lucid (400-500? after you OBO on ebay) and
-doesn't require hard drives / transferring
-is 16-24 channels (add $300 for 2nd lynx card, just make sure you get a 2-3 slot chassis)

Is there not a SCSI to SATA bridge available for $400-500? If so, for your workflow (record, then transfer), that would make more sense I'd think (at least get all the channels, get rid of extra cables etc).

 

[carausius]

I bought my used Lucid for £200, they usually go for double that, the 68pin SCSI to SATA bridge ws £34, but now they are $300!

Lucid were supposed to have bought out a Mac Firewire interface but that never happened! The Lynx AES gear like Aurora & RME is good but very expensive. I was using a Macbook Pro with a Digi002 / PT10 but starting getting fed up with constant cost of upgrades / staring at a computer screen . I prefer working with the MX2424 although I use DAW's for Drum tracks & virtual instruments.

Start your DAW tracks from the same location & use MX2424 tape mode it's easy enough in Pro Tools. A lot easier than syncing Pro Tools or Logic with an analog R2R used to be!

Is there any other way of connecting ultra160 scsi drives to a modern computer from the MX2424, instead of using an old PCI card?

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

I'm still not quite following the point of the lucid in your chain. If you have a scsi to sata adapter, why not just use that with the MX. What's the lucid doing for you? Is it connected to your computer somehow? I don't see any ouptuts except analog and ADAT on the Lucid, which are both options on an MX. What am I missing here?

As for the Lynx AES gear being expensive, yes if you're buying the converters, but the AES16e card is all that's needed. It plugs directly to the Tascam (with appropriately pinned cables). $300 used.

There's probably some way to plug a scsi drive to a "modern computer" (not sure if you mean desktop which is probably easier, or laptop), but it seems to involve staring at a computer for weeks and finding some weird hole in the space-time continuum. Some people on this forum though have gotten SATA or SSDs to work (not sure how much those bridges cost or if they're still available). That's why I presented an option to go around the whole hard-disk issue and get to a completely modern/robust (thunderbolt) connection for about $500-600 which isn't a big expense if we do this as work.

As far as Pro Tools / Digi 002, that way some moons ago. The converters in that thing sucked. Those days were on the cusp, when everything that came out a few years later wasn't only better, it was almost necessary because the previous stuff was so riddled with issues (sonic or otherwise). We've reached a point though where you can stay on the same converters / computer for very long spans of time if you want and even the same version of Pro Tools if you're willing. I kept a Mac Pro tower from 2006-2015. I kept Pro tools 9 or 10 (can't recall) for probably 5 years. Paid $500 for it, still sold it off when I was done, bought another license off ebay (maybe lost $200 in the transaction, I can't recall). I've been on 11 for eons. Anyway, you can buy a computer (not even that recent) and drive it into the ground at this point, same for converters (the older Lynx Auroras for example. If you "need" something higher end, you probably make enough money for it to not be an issue changing to more recent stuff), same for DAW software as long as you don't mind the internet starting to act weird due to OS issues when you get 5-10 years into it. That said, I've got Pro Tools 11 on Mac OS 10.13.4 and it works.

So why do I have an MX2424? For channels 17-32. I'm using Apollos for 1-16. I don't really "need" 32 channels, but I do have a big room and tons of mics, so the MX lets me get the count up without costing quite as much.

350 mx2424 w/ AES
200 pcie -> TB chassis
300 lynx card
____________
850 + 200 custom cables and TB (if not making the db25s myself)
meh, still about 1/2 the cost of a Lynx Aurora16 with TB card unless you get pretty lucky.
Though in a few years, the costs will get much closer to each other unless MX's go for like $100. The Aurora's will keep falling probably (since their new series is out + Orions, other 32 channel options, etc).

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

Well, not quite accurate. $1050 would be vs. around 1600 Lynx. If using only 16 channels of the MX. Of course, the reason I got into this is that if I can't hear a difference ADAT vs. AES (and I'll know in a few weeks), then it's $450 (MX + adat card) for those 16 channels and nothing's beating that unless subjectively (like if someone likes a really cheap 8 ch mic pre like the profire 2626 over the MX converters). Don't have time to test all that, yeesh.

 

[carausius]

I have the MX2424 AES card connected to the AES i/o on the Lucid, on channels 1-8, with the MX analog card used for channels 9-24.

I've definitely noticed a difference between recordings done via Lucid AES into the MX & Lucid ADAT into the Digi002. So I use the Lucid with the MX for recording & most mixing.

Another reason I transfer the MX SATA drive from caddy to docking station is because I would have to do three passes in real time via ADAT to the Digi002 for a 24 track song.

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

As far as I understand it, your original post is not related to my original post. Perhaps I'm still confused. It sounds like your goal is to use the hard drives. My goal, in the title "as converters" is to get them out of the picture entirely.

I'm also still lost as to what good the lucid is doing for you. Based on your last post it sounds like you are using the lucid conversion for the first 8 channels of the MX. I personally would just plug the lucid to the 002. But I get that you like the standalone recorder thing over DAWs for some of your workflow.

It sounds like the 002 is basically acting as a furewire card for your mx. And/or perhaps you're on a version of PT before 9 when you had to have avid/digi hardware to use the software.

If what you're doing works great for you cheers! Again my whole point was to bypass all the stages of transfers and just be able to hit record and playback from the computer. 16-24 channels in and out for 1000-1300$ roughly. And no other boxes needed. As in no lucid, no 002, no drive docks. 2 different goals.

 

[witzendoz]

My MX2424 have both analog and Adat cards, I have a M-audio profire light bridge that takes the Adat from the MX2424 and converts it to firewire and back the other way for monitoring, this way the MX2424 acts as a stand alone converter. I don't use it much but when guys bring in their own Pro-tools or something on a lap top we connect to that. It's getting a bit old so I don't know where the driver updates stop?

Alan.

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

Regardless of when the updates stop, unless adat disappears from modern converters (and I wish it would in favor of AES, but the physical jack size is an issue maybe?), there will always be pretty cheap adat-> FireWire boxes or whatever the replacements of FW are I imagine...

 

[carausius]

BusyboxSt57, I use the Lucid AES to MX on all recording inputs, fill up 1-8, then 9-15, 16-24, by changing the MX inputs to track settings, the MX analog i/o's are really just used for playback.

I've been transferring material from Pro Tools to Logic since the early '00's, so swapping out drives to & from the MX works for me, although I can see why others would just like to press play on the MX2424 & record into computer DAW. That's great if you have enough channels to do in one pass.

I would like to connect up the Lucid 88192 straight to a laptop, but I didn't see anything out there to do the job (AES Dsub 8 channel i/o interface) Lucid goes up to 192K on 8 channels so it would be a cool portable setup A lot better than Lucid - ADAT into Digi002 which I've already tried!

Your ideas for a AES recording setup sound to me like they should work without any problems, I'm wondering if one of the audio recording stores don't have a similar demonstration working system set up to encourage potential sales.

It will be also interesting to see your comparison of ADAT & AES data & signals.

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

Gotcha (about the 1-24 lucid).

Not sure how many converters you've compared but the numbers don't mean much. Once it's 24 bit, there's some difference up to 96 but a great converter at 44.1 will still smoke a good one at 192 (not saying what the lucid is, I have never heard one).

I'm sure no shop would have the AES setup I described since it would encourage sales of anything except eBay stuff like mx2424s that haven't been made in forever. Everything has been built with FireWire, thunderbolt or USB for a long time now.

 

[carausius]

AES / EBU equipment is top quality, I picked my Lucid up from a TV studio & the MX2424 was an ex BBC Radio machine, it even had Doctor Who music still left on the internal drive LOL!

The stores would rather you buy the latest prosumer gear, but I reckon your proposed AES setup would be much better built & more reliable in use.

 

[BusyBoxSt7]

There are two different issues, connection to computer (or similar brand products) and connection between devices. For example, there is nothing inferior to AES about stacking a bunch of thunderbolt interfaces. It's much simpler and you can do really high channel count through a shoestring cable. And the data is fine.

USB, FW, TB work for interface to computer and between similar brands, but you can't stack up multiple units of different brands due to driver issues (companies use their own drivers, not like AES / adat / spdif etc)

And it works or it doesn't and you restart it. Adat/and spdif over toslink suffer largely due to the cable (the cable is toslink, adat and spdif are digital info formats). Toslink suffers jitter (clocking) issues and sometimes data damage issues (doesn't arrive "bit perfect", in other words it loses data in transmission sometimes). AES is the most reliable connection (cable wise, not really a format issue I don't think) of the old formats. TDIF is probably super similar to AES (?) but doesn't matter cause very few units use it (Tascam, avid?).

My beef is simply that SPDIF coax jacks need to disappear in favor of XLR AES jacks (a few people say it's the other way around if you use "proper" cables for the coax, I think meaning instead of rca style cables) I haven't A/B'd every possible way to know. But 9 of 10 people making the gear and engineers seem to take AES over SPDIF especially if a separate wordclock cable isn't in use. We're talking 2 ch connection to a separate external DA here.

Computer connection wise, TB is the way unless you have a tower and don't mind the bulky cables of AES and don't need TONS of channels / have lots of spare PCIE slots for that. That's a fine option too. TB should replace all FW and USB but it won't due to cost probably and cause so many windows computers don't have it.

My main beef though is just the toslink/adat should go away as the go-between for interfaces. It has limited bandwidth (stuck to 48K and only 8 channels per cable in only one direction) but more importantly sometimes suffers quality issues in transmission. I don't know much of anything about Dante, "rednet" (?), or madi. And some of those might be the answer. There's also Ethernet/cat6 (though i think that might require drivers and not work for mix/match connectivity). This may never happen though. Or at least I don't see AES becoming normal on cheap interfaces cause it's large and cheap interfaces must have pres and be one rack unit tall (for some dumb consumer reason, but I would say it's demand, people like small stuff cause it's more "hi tech" even if it's actually lower or less tech sometimes). And because the guy who buys a $300 interface can buy an adat cable for $5 to get enough channels for drums recorded in his kitchen. 8 channel AES cables are 5-10x the price. It's demand as much as supply I think. There's way more money in selling a ton of cheap met gear than in selling a few units at 3000$+. That said, there's already plenty of gear made that has all the right connections. It's just more expensive. If you ever get really into A/Bing various gear even just for purchasing, you know why it's expensive for the companies who really do bring something unique to the table. R&D takes a lot of time, a lot of listening. At the end of the day, for most units, we "get what we pay for" with a few really well-stacked units standing out of the pack quality and/or features for $$ wise. So there isn't a huge surprise with most of this stuff. I namely just wish the spdif and adat/spdif over toslink would dissapear from $2000+ interfaces. But it's still quite common and it is because most engineers who understand or care about the issues with it are almost all on dedicated converters well over $2000 mark. Apollo is one of the rare exceptions, it's right on the line of prosumer/pro. Can sound great but it's not boutique per se either. And in most cases it has the jacks id rather see swapped out.