Any limitations to length of SPDIF cable?

[Jeff Scott]

Looking to connect my Drummers Edrum Brain (spdif output) to the SAC spdif input. How long can the cable be? Do I need an extender as per Toslink?

[Sound Machine Inc]

about 30' is the max

[gdougherty]

Coax or optical? Optical can run longer assuming a good glass fiber cable. There are also baluns that will run it over cat5 and give longer runs up to 300ft.

[Sound Machine Inc]

Hey George according to most sources the fiber tops out at 10 meters and you can SOMETIMES get 15 meters with coax if it is AWESOME coax cable..
see chart on the rane site
http://www.rane.com/note149.html

[roffez]

Depends on
1) the quality (read: power) of the sender module
2) the sensitivity of the receiver module
3) the loss of the cable
Minimum guaranteed to work by spec is 5m (15') with any cable, better sender / receiver combinations *might* work on longer runs if using a good cable but I won't trust it. The thing is that you usually don't know what types of sender and receiver modules are used. On a long run, the difference between "on" and "off" on the optical cable is too small because there is not enough light coming through (that's also why passive splitters usually don't work). As it's not easy to find out how much headroom is left, I would go with an extender for anything longer than 5m.

[Jeff Scott]

I'm thinking to use Coax, not glass fiber.

Actually..any recomendations would be appreciated. It's an RCA to RCA connection. I'm aware of the Baluns but not sure how they work. Are they self powered? Contain a little transformer? How do they modify the signal to travel over Cat5 ?

I currently hookup my SAC Host Spdif In/Out with and RCA to RCA patch cord about 1 ft. long.

[Butch Bos]

It may NOT be (by the book) but I have 2 systems running with spdif on a pair of cat 5 cable at 150 feet with NO problems at all
From usb sound card at FOH to Raydat at stage

Butch
Just try it and see if it works for you

[RBIngraham]

Like anything the specifications are there to provide a minimum that all hardware should be capable of handling. Just look at MIDI, the spec states 50' but with a few exceptions I have run that hundreds of feet through TT patchbays and all kinds of crap and it has worked fine. Although that's a lot more robust protocol due mostly to it's low baud rate and such...

Anyway, a better way to answer the question would be how far do you need to run it? Then we could talk about ways to make it happen rather than talking about it in the abstract of how far it might be able to run. There are just too many factors, the gear itself, what cable you're using, etc....

Do you need 50', 150'... 500' ????

[Yogi]

with RG6 I've run spdif coax 130'. Consider this, coax is what TVs and cameras run on (by and large) at high transmission frequencies and you can run a lot of coax before you degrade the signal to a TV. The spec for spdif is 0.5 vp-p. That's healthy enough for some good runs with good cable.

[Jeff Scott]

I'll be running it probably 75 ft max.

Questions: Outside of interconnecting with RCA to RCA connections...What do I do to convert the RCA over to Cat5? Do I use the Balun Coax to cab 5 connector or is there an RCA to Cat5 adaptor? Sorry to be a bit dense on this....