...no matter of how they sound? [;)]

Genelec showed a "digital monitor" a few years ago, and there have certainly been others. Even Roland made one.

All things being equal, though, I'd personally rather run audio cables across my room. Plus lightpipe only sounds good if you clock both ends of the run using a wired format. (Notice that even ADATs used 9-pin for clock, not the lightpipe.)

Dynaudio's Air-System.

/Dietz

Have you checked out the the amazing Meridian (same company who created MLP technology for the DVD audio standard) line of digital speakers with DA converters, crossovers, and amps within the cabinet? Their design is truly second to none in this area. Can be $$ though. Obviously, having five or so matching speakers would create the most coherent soundfield. They are at www.meridian-audio.com
Rob

Roland makes a line of digital bi-amped powered monitors with analog and both coax and optical inputs. I own the DS-5's and they're actually pretty sweet- especially for the price.

Gosh you can't beat teh price of those DS-8s @ $495. And the DS-5 is only $195. Wow.

They mst sound terrible! LOL

But I will go to the store and give them a listen.

Thanks,
Evan Evans

OH [[:(]]

They are each $495.

[[:(]]

They ... uh ... must sound great. [:O]ops:

EEE

@Nick Batzdorf said:

All things being equal, though, I'd personally rather run audio cables across my room. Plus lightpipe only sounds good if you clock both ends of the run using a wired format. (Notice that even ADATs used 9-pin for clock, not the lightpipe.)

Interesting. Well it looks like the DS series from Roland uses wired digital pass through. So i guess it clocks in phase at least to a certain frequency, perhaps 12Khz or so. Above that things sound nice phasing anyway.

LOL

Evan Evans

@Nick Batzdorf said:

All things being equal, though, I'd personally rather run audio cables across my room. Plus lightpipe only sounds good if you clock both ends of the run using a wired format. (Notice that even ADATs used 9-pin for clock, not the lightpipe.)

Interesting. Well it looks like the DS series from Roland uses wired digital pass through. So i guess it clocks in phase at least to a certain frequency, perhaps 12Khz or so. Above that things sound nice phasing anyway.

LOL

Evan Evans

I had never thought about a clocking mismatch problem with the DS-5's. They sound fine to me- BUT we're using them with a Roland VS-2480, so one would imagine they'd be rather combatible. Plus, we run them coax.

Note that I'm not saying there's a mismatch or that it flat out doesn't work! Jitter is much more subtle.

Lightpipe is a pretty jittery format, especially over longer runs, so it's best to clock both ends separately. In other words, lightpipe only sounds bad if something with converters syncs to the clock embedded in the datastream going through the lightpipe. If you ignore that clock and instead distribute word clock or digital black, it's a perfectly good format.

It's a good idea to use distributed clock in most - but not all - cases anyway, even when you're not using lightpipe. I tried to get those snobs on the Pro Audio list to explain why that is a few years ago, but they had their noses too far up their own you-know-whats and I got a private letter from the moderator saying that this was too basic a question for them. [:)] Maybe someone knows the answer?

What I do know is that the extra jitter in lightpipe is caused by refraction at the connectors. Also, some higher-end D/As have jitter attenuation built in (dual PLLs, usually), so they don't necessarily want to be clocked externally - which would make everything I'm saying invalid!

Bottom line, all I'm saying is that I'd rather run an audio cable than a lightpipe + a word clock cable to a speaker.