What Odyssey Device is this?

[Walt Shires]

Hi,

I recently got a CP650 for my home projector setup - and it came with this add-on from Odyssey. I'm not quite sure what it does. Does anyone recognize what this is and could let me know? There are 2 boards that connect to the unit - one to the output connector and the other to the Option connector. There is a wire that connects the two PCB boards too. Thank you!


IMG_0659.jpg
IMG_0657.jpg
IMG_0658.jpg

[Phil Ranucci]

The large board provides a DB25 to go to your monitor panel and screw terminals to drive your amplifiers.
Very handy to have.
Can't remember if small one links EX decoding from internal card to amp outputs.( I think) or to QSC monitor panel.

[Tj Hopland]

In the 650 when you add any of the I/O expansion boards the LS and RS outputs move to the I/O port rather than the main output. The cable going between the boards is sending the LS RS signals back to the main output area where many of the amp or monitor crossovers were expecting it to be especially those conceived before advent of EX (single rear surround channel) . Monitors designed in this era and for the 650 had an additional port for the I/O connector. A monitor like the USL CM680 that connector was a DB25 so one could just used a straight cable at least until D cinema came along.

Where the DB9 port comes in is for the first gen QSC DCM monitor crossovers that used a DB9 port to break out and return the surround signals to an external decoder such as the SA-10. With this board you could use a straight DB9 cable and set the switch on the DCM to EX and you were ready to go. The differences between the DCM 1,2, & 3 were number of way crossovers and overall channels. Next gen was the DCM 10, 30 and those had the 2nd DB25 connector so you were fine with straight cables till D cinema.

The reason I say until D cinema is the AES inputs are also on that I/O port. The original Cat 794 board only has one or two AES pairs as can be seen by the screw terminals in the photos. When D cinema came around you needed 4 pairs so you needed to change to the cat 790. Odyssey responded to that by coming up with new versions of the I/O board that had various port combinations depending on the rest of your hardware. There were boards that had RJ45's and or DB25's for the 4xAES inputs and those boards had matching transformers since the 650 was unbalanced. I think there were RCA and BNC options that didn't include the transformers if you needed such an application. Outputs you could get the outputs as screws, DB9 for DCM123 or DB25 for the monitors like CM680 or DCM1030 and then there was always the option of the ribbon cable back to the main output board if you needed that.

The unit in the photos was likely pulled when D cinema was installed or used with an external DAC. Some of the external DACs could have been had for less cost than a a 790 card but limited you to 5.1. Having the 794 EX card implied you likely had rear surround channels in place so it wasn't like you would have needed to add amps and speakers when 7.1 came along but we don't know what the timeline was in this case. Maybe 7.1 wasn't quite a thing yet when they went to D cinema and when 7.1 looked worth doing they decided to yank out the 35mm that they had not used in years and put in a CP750 or any of the other D cinema processors that were available at the time.

[Walt Shires]

Thank you for the replies. It makes it so much easier to understand what is what when people (who know) help us (those who don't) out.

I'm getting that much closer to being up and running!