Optical Digital Audio problem

Hello
I just recently bought a MacPro2.6GHz and am having problems with the optical digital audio connectors. I used these with a Yamaha 01V digital desk until recently on a G4 with an optical audio PCI card on board, It worked great. When I now plug into the MacPro I'm just getting digital noise. I have the output correctly selected in the preferences. I have instructed the 01V to locate a suitable WorldClock on the Mac and it shows no errors. I suspect it is a synching problem but don't know enough about it to continue. Any help out there?

Eoin

Im probably stating the obvious here, but keep in mind that the mac pro outputs TOSLINK and that the 01v might be expecting ADAT?

Hi
Thanks for reply. I am unfamiliar with Toslink. The desk card is ADAT. Are these incompatible?

Thanks again

Hi

Although TOSLINK and ADAT both use the same lightpipe hardware, they are not compatible.

TOSLINK is a consumer standard for connecting hifi components etc. These signals have exactly the same format as the electrical S/PDIF signals except, instead of using high/low voltages on copper to represent the binary 1's and 0's of digital information, TOSLINK utilizes a series of on/off pulses of a red transmitting light. Some people refer to it informally as optical S/PDIF. This is what the mac pro outputs by default as far as I know.

ADAT on the other hand, is a more professional standard and supports up to 8 channels of audio over a single connection. Typical usage is connecting a 8 channel mic pre to the 01v for instance.

If the o1v only supports ADAT (which I think it does) you are out of luck. This however means that your old card was ADAT, and pretty kickass IMO.

Once again stating the obvious, but check if you can maybe switch the mac to adat (highly unlikely) or the o1v to TOSLINK.

Hope this helps.

Hello again
Thanks for the info. Can you recommend a decent reasonably priced sound card I can use with the Mac Pro?

Appreciate the help

Eoin