janez

Hi guys
I haven´t been on the forum for quit a while now, which is a good sign concerning kx.
So instead of bothering you with any problems I thought you might enjoy a kx success story with a few pictures
I did this about a year ago and it works so well and maybe there even are a few useful informations in there. I´m talking about setting up a „dual kx“ system with 2 Audigy cards, 2 Frontmoduls and 2 digi breakout brackets on the back.

2 kx Cards, thats not exactly new, I know. But my goal was to make use of all the spdif ins and thus to have the cards interconnected with 2 spdif lines both ways and still have the spdif ins on the outside available.
Nowadays kx Hardware is so cheap on ebay. With a bit of patience you can have an Audigy SB090 for 1 Euro plus shipping. And the frontmodules are affordable, too.
So I had like 7 of those Audigy Cards, 2 live drive IRs and 2 live drive IIs.
The Question was „If i connect the Frontmodules and pass the signal through to the digi breakout brackets, how do I interconnect the frontmodules or the cards because all the connectors are in use.

Well, you have the connector for the ribbon cable that goes to the card. Then there is the one on top of that for the digi bracket.
Then there are two more connectors. One is the undocumented „Creative mystery port“ for further developments called "AUD_EXT_2" and on top of that we have a connector for a bracket with a digi din port.



Thats that thing:



And we have the pinout for that:



So it was just a matter of measuring through the Adapter to figure out the pinout of this connector.
Here it is with the corresponding pins of the digi din port:

MiniDin Pin 8 spdf0#0 01 xx 02 MiniDin Pin 1/2 gnd
03 x 04
MiniDin Pin 1/2 gnd 05 xx 06 MiniDin Pin 6 ZVideo Spdif in
07 08
MiniDin Pin 5 spdf0#1 09 xx 10 MiniDin Pin 1/2gnd /spdif1=digital center/LFE out
MiniDin Pin 4 spdf0#2 11 xx 12 MiniDin Pin 9 spdf0#3 spdif rear out
13 14
MiniDin Pin 1/2 gnd 15 xx 16 MiniDin Pin 3 Midi in
MiniDin Pin 1/2 gnd 17 xx 18 MiniDin Pin 7 Midi out

or without:

spdf0#0 01 xx 02 gnd
03 x 04
gnd 05 xx 06 ZVideo Spdif in
07 08
spdf0#1 09 xx 10 gnd digital center/LFE out
spdf0#2 11 xx 12 spdf0#3 spdif rear out
13 14
gnd 15 xx 16 Midi in
gnd 17 xx 18 Midi out

So in theory it was all there. The tricky part was to make the zVideo Spdif in work. The normal coax and the CD spdif in are adjusted to accept a standard 0,5 Volt signal and they usually work with whatever you feed them.
But from pin to pin the zVideo spdif in should still work, right? The pins should deliver a 5 Volt signal.
Well sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesnt.
So instead of measuring and building hardware to boost or something, I simply tried out the scenario that should work with different hardware.
Swapping cards didn´t make any difference whatsoever. With the drivebays it did make a difference which ones I used. I took me a while and a lot of experiments to figure out the obvious: The zVideo input always works with all drivebays. Wether it works or not depends on what drivebay is feeding that input. And the consistent pattern was: No chance with the drivebay IRs and it works fine in both directions with the livedrive IIs.



here is one card receiving a signal on 2 spdif ins at the same time



By that time I didn´t know if I could generalize from there. Does the output of a live drive II always work on a zVideo spdif input and does it never when it comes from a live dive IR? I turns out I can´t.

In the meantime I found 2 more live drive IIs on ebay and build myself a second dual kx system. In that combination one card accepts an spdif signal on all three inputs and the other one only on CD spdif in and coax in. In that Computer I interconnected the cards only with one spdif in each direction and used the CDspdif on the one that works with all inputs for the output of an old digidesign Audiomedia III card that allows me to do 24 bit bittransparent recording and recording with 44.1 if I need to.
And I still have all the coax and optical on the outside.

In the first machine I also have a scope fusion system running on a pulsar card with 4 sharc dsps. So I got lots of dsp power in that computer :-)
The scope fusion connects to the kx coax front. It has AES/EBU, balanced analog in and out and 2 Adat in and out for which I have an interface with 8 Mic Inputs.
Sorry the forum software just told me: "no more pictures" Mabe If I start another post.

janez

Ok here is the pinout for that digiDin connector on the live drive in a more readable form:

And a few more pics:

shopping on ebay:

ribbonz

Tyrsonswood

Cool stuff man........ Looks somewhat familiar.

So, how many inputs (analog) can you record from at one time?

__________________

janez

Thanks! :-)

In theory with all the ADCs there are, as I can transmit the signal of each one to the main recording card on a separate spdif in. All three of them work in both directions. So (AC97 + UDA + Aux2) x 2 thats up to 6 Stereo or 12 Mono Inputs that I could record on seperate tracks.
I havn´t tried that and I would rather use my 8 channel Adat Interface. Still this is a nice low cost alternative for a rehearsal room or something.

The idea was rather to have more Aux sends and returns between the cards for a more flexible dsp playground.