[linux-audio-dev] Re: [linux-audio-user] Recording ADAT inputs on RME hammerfall 9636/52

[Stephen Cameron]

Well, mixed results tonight.

I was able to get some sound to go across the ADAT
cables from the PC to the AW4416.  But not good sound.

On the bright side, I think I more or less understand
connecting things up with jack, ecasound, and so on.
On the bad side, so far it's not working too well.

I monitored things with "jackmeter" and this meter
registered peaks near 0dB for the stuff I was playing
with ecasound, and pretty high levels for the most part.

On the AW4416, the levels were registering between -30dB
and -48dB.  I guess I don't understand how ADAT works.
I was under the impression the signal going across the
cables was digital -- and so to get a reduction in levels
like that, I would expect some digital numbers would have
to go from being big numbers to being small numbers, which
seems unlikely thing to happen to numbers encoded as pulses
going down a cable.  So I conclude I don't know how ADAT
works, except it's not as I imagined it did.

Oh, and besides a drastic loss of signal level, the signal
was distorted strangely.  Hard to describe.  This may be
due to xruns... I haven't got things to work without xruns
yet, but that shouldn't cause a drop in levels, right?  Just
kind of choppiness, dropouts, crappy sound, right?

Transfering from the AW4416 to the PC did not work at all.
on capture_1 and capture_2, I got very low level white noise 
apparently.  Are those the s/pdif ports?  On the other
channels input was dead silence.

I tried both ADAT ports on the RME board, with similar results
on each.  I tried swapping the two ADAT cables in case one of
the cables was bad... this did not seem to make a difference.
Maybe the RME just transmits harder than the Yamaha, so it's 
signal makes it across (just barely, crossing the finish
line at -48dB) while the yamaha's signal dies.

I did change the RME's frequency to 44.1kHz in qjackctl's 
setup window.


Maybe there are some clues in here:
[root at zuul R15]# cat /proc/asound/R15/rme9652 
RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5) (Card #2)
Buffers: capture f6a00000 playback f6400000
IRQ: 10 Registers bus: 0xea000000 VM: 0xf88a2000
Control register: 48029

Latency: 1024 samples (2 periods of 4096 bytes)
Hardware pointer (frames): 1024
Passthru: no
Clock mode: autosync
Pref. sync source: ADAT1

ADAT1 Input source: ADAT1 optical

IEC958 input: Internal
IEC958 output: Coaxial only
IEC958 quality: Consumer
IEC958 emphasis: off
IEC958 Dolby: off
IEC958 sample rate: error flag set

ADAT Sample rate: 44100Hz
ADAT1: No Lock
ADAT2: Sync
ADAT3: No Lock

Timecode signal: no
Punch Status:

 1: off  2: off  3: off  4: off  5: off  6: off  7: off  8: off 
 9: off 10: off 11: off 12: off 13: off 14: off 15: off 16: off 
17: off 18: off 


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