Audio Engineering: Know It All

Chapter 18. Digital Audio Interfaces

18.1. Digital Audio Interfaces

Many of the advantages of digital signal processing are lost if signals are repeatedly converted back and forth between the digital and analogue domain. So that the number of conversions could be kept to a minimum, as early as the 1970s, manufacturers started to introduce proprietary digital interface standards enabling various pieces of digital audio hardware to pass digital audio information directly without recourse to standard analogue connections. Unfortunately, each manufacturer adopted its own standard, and the Sony digital interface (SDIF) and the Mitsubishi interface both bear witness to this early epoch in digital audio technology when compatibility was very poor between ...