Z Systems Z161R

Now that digitital equipment is arriving in project studios, a digital patchbay becomes a worthwhile purchase. Mike Collins goes back to his routes...

What's in a name? Quite a lot if it's the name of this product, although the convoluted title is quite appropriate once you know what the Detangler does. It is in fact a patchbay and distribution amplifier for digital audio signals, and you can chain units together as necessary to provide as many patch points as you need for your studio.

I recently upgraded my home recording setup to include a Yamaha 02R digital mixer and both Digidesign Pro Tools III and ADAT digital recorders. I am also evaluating a Sonic Solutions SonicStudio, and have a Sony DTC1000 DAT player and a Denon CD player as additional digital audio sources. So, my challenge was to be able to route sources to whichever destinations without having to crawl behind my racks and unplug cables. Could the Detangler be the answer to my problem?

Features

Although available in various configurations (see the 'Pricing' box for more details), I was sent a z1616r Detangler (16 Ins, 16 Outs) for the purposes of this review. It's a black 19‑inch, 1U rackmount unit with only an on/off switch on the front panel. The back panel features an IEC mains socket, four DB25 connectors for the digital audio inputs and outputs, and two DB9 connectors for RS422 In and Thru. The RS422 In socket can be connected to a remote control unit or to your personal computer; the RS422 Thru socket lets you link up multiple routers. I use a Power Mac computer, so Z Systems supplied their Digital Audio Crosspoint software to let me control the Detangler from my Macintosh. PC users will be pleased to hear that Windows software is also available.

The unit was supplied with four sets of DB25‑to‑XLR cable harnesses, with eight floating XLR plugs or sockets at the end of each harness to connect to the studio equipment. Two sets of these had female XLRs to connect to the outputs of the digital audio sources, while the other two sets had male XLRs to connect to the digital audio destinations. The manual points out that the pin‑out connections on the DB25s are identical to those used by the Tascam DA88, and they claim that these are actually superior to the Tascam ones, as they are fully AES/EBU‑compliant. The same type of cable harnesses are also used by the Fostex RD8 and Sony PCM800 recorders. Usefully, the pin‑out connections for the DB25 connectors are provided with the unit, so you can make up your own cables if you prefer. A DB9‑to‑DIN8 cable was also provided to connect the Detangler to the Mac's serial port and, again, pin‑outs for both the In and the Thru DB9 connectors were in the documentation.

The z1616r actually lets you hook up 16 AES/EBU stereo pairs, and its configuration is defined by a set of 16 'to/from' pairs. Each 'to' can have only one 'from' sent to it at any one time. This is self‑evident if you think about it for a moment — the Detangler is a routing matrix, not a device that mixes digital audio signals together, as the Yamaha 02R does. So you simply connect up to 16 sources and destinations to the Detangler and then edit the 'to/from' pairs one at a time to achieve the routings you want. For instance, you could connect the output of a digital audio workstation (DAW) to the inputs of 16 DAT recorders at the same time to make 16 transfers simultaneously. Or you could send the output of one DAW to eight DAT recorders at the same time as sending the output of another DAW to another five DAT recorders and the output of an A/D converter to yet another three machines. And the Detangler is fully asynchronous — which means that multiple sample rates can be handled simultaneously — so some of your audio routings could be running at 44.1kHz while other routings could be running at 48kHz.

The optional remote controller for the z1616r lets you save and recall up to 15 different configurations, so that you can quickly switch to different setups for archiving the contents of a DAW to DAT, CD mastering, duplicating DATs, or whatever. These configurations are held in non‑volatile RAM in the remote controller, so they'll be retained even with the power off. The z1616r itself also has non‑volatile RAM, but this will only hold one configuration, always loaded on power‑up. The remote control is a good choice if you don't have a computer to control the units or if you prefer to hit buttons and play with knobs (the Detangler has no front‑panel controls). You can use the remote to control up to four routers for larger setups, but the computer control software is a better choice here, as this lets you control up to 16 linked z1616r units, for instance.

Software

Using the Crosspoint software, you type in the names of the various devices you have connected to whichever inputs and outputs on the Detangler; you can also add a detailed description of each device in a text window. Once you've named all your devices, you configure your routing patches in the patch window: two arrow buttons control which source device is sent to the destination device for each line in the routing window.

When a patch has been changed on the screen, it will no longer match the physical routing configuration in the z1616r, so the software highlights all the modified lines in red — to make them active, you simply click on a big 'Send To Router' button.

I needed to be able to use both the Pro Tools and the SonicStudio system I was evaluating with my Yamaha 02R — and I had just one 8‑way AES/EBU interface installed on the 02R. Placing the Detangler between the two DAWs and the 02R interface allowed me to connect the 8‑way interface from Pro Tools and the 4‑way interface from the SonicStudio into the patchbay, and select whichever routing I wanted to and from the 02R. The 02R also has stereo digital outputs and 2‑track digital inputs, and I could connect both my DAT and CD to its inputs using the Detangler, and still have plenty of room left to hook up a pair of PrismSound A/D and D/A units, an Aardverter A/D/A, a Genesis A/D/A, and a Manley D/A unit.

I set up my first patch to route the four pairs of 02R AES/EBU outputs to the four pairs of Pro Tools inputs, and was able to simultaneously route the first two pairs of 02R AES/EBU outputs to the two pairs of SonicStudio inputs. I chose to route the two pairs of SonicStudio outputs to the first two pairs of 02R inputs, and routed the second two pairs of Pro Tools outputs to the second two pairs of Pro Tools inputs. This way, I could use all the inputs to the two DAWs with all the outputs of the SonicStudio and two pairs of outputs from the Pro Tools — enough for many scenarios where I would be mixing most of my Pro Tools tracks internally.

To check out the various different D/A converters, I routed the 02R stereo outputs to the Prism, Aardverter and Genesis units. The Detangler was thus acting as a distribution amplifier to feed all the D/A converter inputs from the one source.

I routed a CD player directly to the Manley unit, while the output of the DAT was routed to the 2‑track inputs of the 02R. It was then an easy matter to switch the output of any of the A/D converters through to the 02R or DAT, or even directly into Pro Tools or the SonicStudio system.

I could only route one set of A/D converters to any pair of inputs at any one time, but it was easy enough to switch the routings in the window to feed the 02R from each converter in turn, by clicking on the buttons in the routing patch window. The result was near‑total flexibility for routing the digital audio signals around my project studio!

Conclusion

The z1616r proved to be an almost perfect solution for my project studio. At first, I thought I might need a 32 x 32 matrix, but it turned out that 16 x 16 was just about the right number. In the not‑too‑distant future I'm intending to add some digital outboard units, such as a Lexicon PCM80 or a TC Electronics Finalizer, and will almost certainly want to use various other units with digital outputs, so I'll probably have to add a second 16‑way Detangler at some stage. Still, it's great to be able to hook up extra units in this way as my needs develop.

One minor drawback is that there's no power indicator light on the front panel, and I sorely missed this when wiring up, as I needed to check whether the power cable was working or not — the only way to do this was to boot up the software on the computer and see if it recognised that the hardware was switched on. My Sony DAT and Denon CD players had no AES/EBU connectors, so I was unable to wire these into the patchbay. I'm now planning to get a Tascam DA30 and a CD player with AES/EBU outputs so I can hook these up to complete my rig. It would be very useful to have an option to add some S/PDIF and optical connections to the z1616r — which is possible with a custom version of the basic 8‑way router available from Z Systems.

I still needed some more patching equipment so that I could route the same analogue source into the various A/D converters I was testing, using a distribution amplifier or automated patchbay. And I also needed to be able to switch the analogue outputs of the D/A converters to route to the analogue inputs of my monitoring amplifier so that I could compare converters. I'm not aware of any currently available off‑the‑shelf units that provide these capabilities, and found myself wondering whether Z Systems might consider making such a device — with me as their first customer!