Hi Daniel,
Man, this has spiraled out of control... whether I have a misconception or not, all I care about is my application...
BACKGROUND
I have my -main- DAW in a control room in one corner of the house. It's a Win7 Sandybridge CPU with an RME 9652. audio gets -into- the 9652 from 3 ADAT inputs...
Digimax #1
Digimax #2
Frontier Designs Tango
The 9652 acts as master clock @ 44.1 (none of the A/Ds go beyond 48)
When I initially hooked everything together, I connected coax cables to the wordclock BNC connector on each device.
At some point, I had to unplug one of the Digimax A/Ds for some reason and when I re-connected I forgot to re-connect the coax (wordclock). And yet... it still seemed to work OK (and no, not just for drums... for -everything-.)
I have -another- room (shed) I record in which is 30m away. What I used to do is run an audio snake... which is a pain. But a friend told me that, despite what I -thought- was a 5m limit on TOSLink cables, he was running a 100ft cable---without problem. So I got a 100ft cable from Monoprice and ran it to that room. I took one of the Digimaxes out to the other room, plugged the TOSLink cable to it and et voila it worked---with no wordclock cable. And by 'worked' -again- I record 20 minute takes of bass, guitar, drums, whatever and I don't hear (or see in the waveforms) problems. Whether this -should- work or not is irrelevant to me. This method -does- work for me with the Frontier Tango and/or the Digimax.
WHAT I WANT TO DO
I had hoped to do something similar with the Babyface. So by 'stand-alone' I do -not- mean that the BabyFace would not be connected to a USB port. I realise this is not possible. By 'stand-alone' I mean that I thought I could take my laptop and the Babyface out to the shed and...
1. Hook 2 mics to the BabyFace
2. Hook a TOSLink cable to the ADAT -out- of the BabyFace
3. Hook the other end of that cable to the ADAT -in- of 9652
...hit the Record button on the DAW and people start playing into the mics hooked to the BabyFace 30m away.
When I tried doing that, it did NOT work. I got no sync. I suspected a bad cable, so I substituted the Digimax and it -would- record.
So... since you say that the above should -not- work, I figured I would try setting the BabyFace as Master clock and the 9652 as Slave.
OR I was going to try hooking a -2nd- TOSLink cable from the BabyFace -in- to one of the unused 9652 -out- and keep the 9652 as Master---just so that the BabyFace can get sync from the 9652.
If you have better suggestions, PLEASE let me know.
Thanks!
---JC