You are not logged in. Please login or register.
RME User Forum → HDSP(e) series → HDSPe MADI FX or AoX for MADI
Is there a difference in MADI performance between the old MADI FX and the new AoX?
Is there anything that MADI FX offers than AoX doesn't have?
And am I correct in assuming that you can connect two extension cards of the same kind, e.g. 2 x EXT-SFP to get 4 optical ports?
The FX in Totalmix are not included in the AoX
And am I correct in assuming that you can connect two extension cards of the same kind, e.g. 2 x EXT-SFP to get 4 optical ports?
Yes, that's correct.
Can the AoX be stacked as with the MADI FX ?
Is there a difference in MADI performance between the old MADI FX and the new AoX?
Is there anything that MADI FX offers than AoX doesn't have?
And am I correct in assuming that you can connect two extension cards of the same kind, e.g. 2 x EXT-SFP to get 4 optical ports?
A few differences between the cards:
- AoX: no FX, thus no 2nd FPGA on board which would be needed for Room EQ / Crossfeed
https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.ph … 62#p220062
- For the AoX you need to purchase the optional available cards to get MADI (additional costs)
- AoX-MADI-EXT-SFP - OM3/4 fiber cable up to 2 km (single mode 10 km) between devices, galvanic isolation
- AoX-MADI-EXT-BNC - cable length up to 100 m, need separate galvanic isolator (if needed)
- the HDSPe MADI FX has already two optical MADI ports on the primary/main card
the 2nd daughter card has the 3rd BNC based MADI bus which can be replaced by an optional card
to get a 3rd MADI bus
- with the AoX it might be possible (I don't know) to add two AoX-MADI-EXT-SFP
which would give you in total 4x optical MADI, SFP based, but then you also need 3 Slots in your PC
or thunderbolt external case. One PCIe slot and two without a connection to the PCIe bus,
connected by ribbon cable to the AoX main card.
- RME usually tests their driver for up to three devices.
Even more devices are possible, but this was not tested and the question is,
whether the computer supports such a high number of cards / channels (*)
(*) The HDSPe MADI FX has a mechanism built-in into the driver, to allocate computer resources only for groups of 8 channels. If at least one channel is in use by the application, then computer resources for all channels of such a group of 8 are being allocated.
This is beneficial when using one or multiple of the HDSPe MADI FX.
I am not sure whether the AoX driver will also have this feature.
If you do not need Milan or the flexibility to swap SFPs between single and multimode the HDSPe MADI FX might offer more flexibility by FX chip and Room EQ.
The 3 MADI channels of the HDSPe MADI FX should be enough for most setups and with the optional daughter card you can even have 3x optical.
It might be useful to know that the HDSPe AoX has its own driver, so there is no ASIO sharing under Windows with other HDSPe cards. Also we do not plan to actively support more than 2 cards in one computer. 512 channels in a DAW is already crazy, 1024 don't need to be topped.
With two cards you also run into network limitations. 512 channels nearly max out a 1 GB/s port, so when using two cards you would need to use a 10 GB/s switch and 10 GB/s network to handle these 1024 channels and still being able to use network for something else.
This info is so helpful. Thanks so much!
I just need 2 MADI ports, so on paper MADI FX would be a good match.
My main concern is performance/latency on Mac. I wondered if AoX, being a more modern design, would have an edge here.
What I'm getting from your responses is, that this may not be the case.
I don't see any problems there. The computer always needs a certain amount of time to process audio properly. No matter how fast the CPUs of the computers are, fewer buffers than 32 samples @single speed is hardly possible, and I have never seen this implemented before. RME manages very low latency across the entire product range, no matter whether USB, PCI, PCIe, or Thunderbolt.
And with these cards even with a massive number of channels.
But we are only talking about a few samples of latency for the internal forwarding from/to PCIe ports or MADI ports on the "backplane / the FPGA" on such a card. The modern converters on the connected devices also only require a few samples for the conversion (AD/DA) of audio.
This is more or less the same for all current cards, regardless of whether the converters are directly on board or connected via ADAT or MADI.
With LAN/AVB I have heard that the buffers can still be adjusted a little, depending on how large the network is, but here too I would not expect any major leaps in the end (regardless of the speed of USB, PCIe or the LAN). Ultimately, the audio data cannot flow any faster than the sample rate.
So I would say it doesn't matter what you take, important is the feature set, that makes most sense for your setup and workflow. Number, type of ports, etc ..
For you, the optimizing driver of the HDSPe MADI FX also could make sense, not sure, whether such driver optimizations are planned for the new cards.
RME User Forum → HDSP(e) series → HDSPe MADI FX or AoX for MADI
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.