Its definitely worth noting that having dealt with ACTUS a fair bit, I have not come across a single aspect which was defined by an economic reason rather than an engineering rationale. The technology and engineering behind it would likely be considered excessive by most, but Varèse demanded it to perform the way we want it to.
That does extend to the cable – we apply the same strict quality control and test standards as we would with any component to ensure the best possible performance and reliability. The cable was developed in collaboration with LEMO, who make incredibly complex cable designs for a range of sectors where quality and reliability are key factors. This definitely isn’t a run of the mill professional grade cable.
All of the technologies that come together to form the ACTUS interface extend far beyond just the cable design. Fundamentally, everything about ACTUS, including the cable, but also the connectors, the software that runs the interface, and the internal PCB sections linking everything together, had to be designed from scratch to make ACTUS work the way we needed it to. We evaluated a lot of solutions already available on the market but came to the conclusion that none would allow us to do what we wanted to with Varèse, so something had to be made from scratch.
That means getting anything working takes a lot of work, as not only do you have to design all of the hardware and software, if something doesn’t work you don’t have a manual to read or a chip supplier to call and ask.
The performance benchmarks for the interface – including the cable – currently exceed the requirements that the Varèse system places upon it. That means we have plenty of headroom to make changes to Varèse without the interface becoming a bottleneck.
ACTUS can be considered everything from the i.MX 8 in one product to another, though arguably it could be extended right through to the FPGA that the i.MX 8 connects to internally. Given that all of the Varèse chassis are designed to create an electrically sealed environment for each of the units, ACTUS needs to maintain this seal. The cable itself consists of 6 twisted pairs, each of which are shielded. There is also a shield around the circumference of the cable. When the cable is terminated into the ACTUS connector, it splays out to create a 100% coverage of the cable. This maintains the sealed environment even between the Varèse units.
The connector itself is a bespoke design, which was made in collaboration with LEMO (like the cable design), which effectively separates the pins / cores carrying the Tomix clock signal from the pins / cores carrying audio and control signals, maintaining signal integrity for the clocks.
A number of construction types were considered for the cable, and the end result is as much a part of the Varèse system as any other. Regarding where ACTUS could go next, there’s huge potential for the interface and the accompanying cabling system we’ve developed, and we’re really excited to keep exploring where we can take it / how we can develop it further following all of the team’s hard work to bring it to life. We will certainly let you know whenever we have any news to share on this.
I think ACTUS definitely deserves a detailed discussion, and its likely we’ll put together a piece for the dCS Edit on ACTUS and Tomix in the future.
probably wasn’t as many around as I thought, as i was a bit overwhelmed by the tour, etc. But certainly there isn’t that many out there. I guess dCS know exactly how many have been made, and how many are demo unit’s/owner.