I have the above setup, with the second SLink card in the SQ5. I bought the SLink so I can use both stage boxes for bigger shows and now I’m too chicken to try them both on bigger shows, fearing some phase issue if the same stage sound goes into the board via the two stage boxes.
Is there any assurance that there will be no unwanted phase or latency differences when used into the separate SLink ports on the board? Like, Vox 1 and Vox 2 are in front of the drums and one goes to AB and one to DX - any issues? I guess any electrical phase anomolies will be dwarfed by real-world mic placement differences…
Given a choice, would you send the vox through the AB and drums/instr through the DX or vice-versa, in general. Just curious what people think.
I’ll play with this setup and see if I can hear anything weird but maybe there is a definitive software-ey/firmware-ey answer as to why I don’t have to worry.
The system will handle any clocking “conversion” needed very cleanly. You shouldn’t have any problems related to this when you use both generations of boxes at the same time. So your fear of getting phasing issues due to the different generation boxes isn’t something you need to worry about.
The DX box has a higher quality preamp than the older 48k boxes. So ideally you put your most important channels on that box and the least important channels on the older box. However I really doubt it is a noticable difference one way or another, so I’d probably just use the inputs on whatever box was closest/most convenient to use.
That’s right. You should just avoid connecting the same microphone to both stage boxes via a splitter and then trying to process both channels in parallel – which probably wouldn’t make sense even if used as a backup.
I don’t know the detailed latency differences between the two stage boxes, but they only account for a portion of the overall signal processing (ADC, Input Channel, Group Channel, Output Channel, Matrix Channel, all mixings!, DAC).
And even the total latency of 0.7 ms would only correspond to a microphone distance of about 24 cm.
Regarding the quality differences: Some people hear significant differences – at least if they know which stage boxes is being used at the time.
But in my opinion, in a honest blind test under practical conditions, most people won’t be able to perceive any definable differences.
I reread the OP and I realized that my reply/comment wasn’t completely accurate. I focused on the “clocking” element of using two different stage boxes and not the actual time it takes for the signal to be processed by the stage box and then passed on to the console (ie the total latency).
When looking at the processing time between stage boxes, it is likely that you would have slightly different latency times depending on what generation of stage box you use. I haven’t measured different generations of stage boxes myself to know for sure, but I have measured the differences between “local” I/O on the console and stage box I/O. The stage box I/O is slightly more latent than the local I/O which is to be expected. Logically, I have to assume that the older 48k stage boxes are slightly more latent than the current 96k stage boxes because they process everything slower.
That being said, you don’t need to worry about tiny differences in latency between non-identical audio sources. So if you hook all your drum channels up to one stage box and your guitars, keys and vocals to another I/O source, it isn’t going to make a difference in the overall sound.
That is because you will never “hear” the different in time between two different sources. You really only need to about latency when you have two IDENTICAL audio sources with different latency times. That’s because while you can’t hear the timing difference between the two audio paths, you certainly can hear the effects of phasing that occurs when two identical audio sources with different latency times interact with each other.
However this isn’t a problem unless your sources are identical (or nearly identical). The only time I could see this happening is if you have two inputs on a single source (snare top & bottom mics, two mics on the same guitar amp, left and right side of a keyboard, etc, etc, etc) and had each input plugged into a different stage box. That would cause an issue if the two sources are similar enough to each other to cause audible phasing, but realistically the chances of that happening are pretty small. Since both inputs would be very close together, it is likely both inputs/mics would be plugged into the same stage box or console I/O which would result in identical latency times for the two sources.
Furthermore, plugging different “non-identical” audio sources into different stage boxes isn’t going to cause enough phasing to worry about. So the fact that your snare mic and your vocal mic (that also picks up some snare bleed) are plugged into two different stage boxes isn’t going to cause enough phasing to be audibly different than plugging them both into the same stage box.
Hopefully that helps answer your question on a more technical level than my original post.