DTS XD10 digital audio out

[Tj Hopland]

Anyone ever use the XD10 digital audio out option on an XD10?

I guess another question that may eliminate the need to ask the first question is if the digital out DB25 is present on the back does that mean the optional DTS E632 card is installed? Or is the jack always there and there may be nothing connected to it inside?

I also note in the V2.1 manual it states that the cable can be no longer than 1 meter. Is that just earlier days of AES3 and being cautious and by the book? I already have what I would guess to be a 25' cat between the racks that was carrying AES3 the other direction that isn't needed anymore.


Reason I'm curious is I'm just wrapping up installing some different audio gear in a venue that still runs film and noticed I got an extra 8 channels AES input doing nothing and was thinking its kinda a waste to take some extra d to a steps especially when there is no optical backup involved with 70.

[Stefan Scholz]

Same I did, using AES connection for Dolby CP 650 (SRD PB) and XD 10 (Datasat/ DTS PB), both on film.
Do they really state 1 meter/ 3 feet of shielded twisted pair audio? AES 3, from transmitters, is like RS 485 or RS 422 balanced bus/ serial transceivers, and that should be more like 100 m/ 300 ft.
1 meter, you can be fine, if the output is unbalanced (50 or 75 ohms) and you are connecting to a balanced (120 ohms) input. Not recommended due to reflections at the end, but ok in short routes.
According to the manual, and what I remember, the XD 10 uses a balanced line driver and works nicely over longer runs of interfacing cable.

The only problem I came into, clock source. In cinema gear, no clock syncing input exists. Sync is taken from AES pair 1, mainly this is the digital projector's media block as a reference. It has to observed, the sync source is also switched with input change.

[Marco Giustini]

The Digital Out is always there but with no 632 you won't get anything out of it.

[Thomas Piccione]

Marco is correct; the db-25 on the back is always there, but the digital daughter card isn't. There should be a tag with checkmarks for what the unit is equipped with on the back.

[Tj Hopland]

Good to know that the connector is always there and now that you mention it I do seem to recall sometimes seeing stickers on the back of these things.

Also a good tip I forgot about with the sync. I have run into that before. In my case the 1-8 will still be connected to a server and I was going to use the 9-16 for this so I will need to make sure those are being handled as independent inputs.

[Sean McKinnon]

I was going to use the 9-16 for this so I will need to make sure those are being handled as independent inputs.

If this is Q-Sys you may be OK with that route. I know for a fact that going into a CP-850/950 you need a clean connection to both the 1-8 and 9-16 you cannot present two clocks without causing dropouts.

[Tj Hopland]

I didn't get a lot of time to look and move cables out of the way to make sure but with a quick glance I didn't see a 632 sticker on the current unit so it doesn't look like I'm going to get a chance to experiment with this at the moment. I know where there is a XD10 graveyard I can check at some point and I'm pretty sure some of those units were from a site that were ordered as the XD10 / XD10P combo packages and I was thinking those may have had the digital option. Does anyone know if one was to find a 632 card is it a plug n play thing or would there be some possible firmware and config things to make the card work in a unit that didn't previously have one?

The Qsys DCIO (and presumably DCIO H) they are independent. I did a 2 screen project where they were both just 5.1 systems and we only used one DCIO for both screens. 1-8 was screen 1 and 9-16 was screen two. I don't know that that was intentional, my guess is it had more to do with the way they appear to be doing the HDMI on the H model. On those you have to toggle between using the 9-16 OR HDMI, you can't do both at the same time so I assume they ideally needed to have each have their own clocks just to make sure that worked.

That twin was an experiment to see if we could get into Qsys 'cheap'. 1 Core 110 and 1 DCIO was the only Q gear, not even a switch for Qlan, just a direct cable between A ports on both pieces. Fed the existing analog amps and even had some I/O left for a lobby system. At the time I called it a success and its still working fine but with price increases if you don't have a immediate need for any of the other features and options Qsys brings to the table there are other options if cheap is the goal.

[Marco Giustini]

The 632 is plug and play - though I’ve seen a few ‘botches’ on those cards, I don’t know which is the ‘latest and greatest’. The card is a dumb I2C to AES converter I believe so the system doesn’t know of there is one installed or not. If not mistaken, levels won’t work on the AES output.