[Jack-Devel] RME Digi9636 and jack usage (long)

Hello all,

I just bought an RME 9636 card and have some questions about using jack with it. I am fully aware that this card is not state of the art anymore and quite outdated, but it will surely be more than sufficient for me for quite a while and it was a bargain. 

Since I am still lacking some hardware (AD/DA converters), I cannot test it myself, but the choice of hardware may depend upon your answers, that's why I am asking beforehand. So please bear with me, I am new to this and may not have the complete grasp of everything. Obviously, as you'll see. 

1. Hardware monitoring. 

With windows there are two possibilities utilizing HW monitoring. You can use the RME driver to directly instruct the card or you can use the ASIO  driver (Haven't actually tried it, as I neither do have any windows nor the required hardware, as stated above, but so I've read in the manual)

I suspect, when starting jack with --hwmon it equals the direct way, while when using qjackctl and redirect the input to an output this would be the ASIO way. Just for my understanding. 

Now for my question: when using --hwmon with the Hammerfall Light, how or where can I specify which output to be used for monitoring? 
Will a sum of all up to 16 ADAT inputs be automatically merged to SPDIF out or do I have a chance to f.e. monitor ADAT 1-8 in on ADAT 1-8 out respectively? So far I was not able to find any information on that and I am not even sure whether this is a jack or RME thing. Still, enlightenment is appreciated. 


2. Bitrate

All connected clients need to have the same sample rate, but what about the bitrate? Let’s say I do have 24Bit/48kHz on my first eight ADAT inputs, but I will monitor all on SPDIF Out (be it by --hwmon or via qjackctl), but this SPDIF DA converter only is 16Bit/48kHz capable, would this work, without any intermediate software? Just jack(ctl) and the card?
For monitoring input streams I could live with a bit of quality loss and I could get such a  converter quite cheap. After all, it really does sum up. 
However, if it does not play well with my ADAT AD converter, it is useless, be it cheap or not. 


3. Alternate functions

Seeing the screenshots from the windows RME control panel, there are some functions like f.e. setting emphasis bit or spdif/out to non audio. 
 
Those settings (and maybe more) are not present when calling alsamixer. What would be the appropriate way to access these settings with linux? This is probably more an alsa than jack question, but maybe I do not have to subscribe to another list just for that information.
I came along alsatools, but those do not work with my card. Only with newer ones. 

In case anybody made it until here, thanks very much for your patience

Mugsy
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