Can somone Explain Light Pipe to me

[iHateRegisteringAtSites]

I know its a optical format, but.... could someone explain the differences between ADAT light pipe and just plain ol' s/pdif optical. It looks to me that they can record and play back multiple channels like record 16 playback 8 or record 32 playback 16. Unlike plain ol optical where its only stereo..... can anyone tell me more stuff.

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

The Lightpipe is Alesis' proprietary optical format to carry 8 channels of digital I/O... S/PDIF is a non-proprietary standard that carries only 2 channels of digital I/O.

Bruce

 

[skippy]

S/PDIF carries 2 channels at up to 24bit/96kHz. ADAT carries 8 channels at up to 24bit/96kHz. I have no idea what differences exist down in the protocols themselves, and there's not a lot of detailed technical information floating around out there: some quick Google searches turned up nothing on the actual lightpipe spec. Even the Alesis web site is silent on spec details. Presumably, you have to pay a licensing fee to Alesis to even get access to details of the spec. There's a little info at http://www.bnoack.com/index.html , but very little...