What are are monitoring the SP/Dif through? If the FOH is using speakers in a room through a board, crossovers,poweramps etc the two signals may be exactly the same but won't sound the same regardless. Everything will change when it goes FOH unless in some amazing feat (without a spectral analyzer) you made it perfectly flat which sounds terrible. FOH is "Amp in the room" which will sound different than IEMs or your monitor onstage pointed at you using the same signal anyway. Being able to adjust them separately, would allow you to better "make them the same" I would think.
There are lots of inexpensive devices that convert digital to analog and analog digital maybe one of the other band members could do that to a channel free up some space for you as a solution until you get a bigger system.
Hello Dynochrome. I'm monitoring through S/PDIF through my Apollo x8p. This saves me two analog inputs on the interface, which is a good reason for the Apollo having a S/PDIF IO system.
About what you said regarding FOH, monitoring my Profiler through the Apollo (whether through S/PDIF r analog outputs) is my only way to minimally "predict" what the live sound will turn out to be. As you said, in a live situation the sound can change due to everything that's happening after the Profiler, but that will always be true and it will always be beyond my control.
My criticism has to do with the fact that, if the S/PDIF output doesn't sound the same (minus conversion which is irrelevant) as the analog outputs, then don't state on the Rig Manager Output section that the S/PDIF output is picking up sound from the 'Master Stereo' because it isn't true - it will sound different.
To make matters worse, the S/PDIF output used to include the Master Stereo output EQ's and filters up until a version of the OS (8.7.14 I think) that came out earlier this year. Changing this behaviour "breaks compatibility" with my old rigs because I was using the Master Stereo output EQ's and filters when I was tweaking the sounds. I find their choice wrong- it's unexpected and kind of hard to pinpoint the reason for the sound changing if you happen to miss it in the release notes. That's why there's complaints from various users. An OS update should never change the sounds IMO.
I'd prefer a checkbox on the Output section of Rig Manager that would allow to optionally include the Master Stereo EQ and filters, the way it was before. I think they did this to not create a potentially unwanted EQ point when re-amping, but I don't agree with the forced removal, they should have let it in as an option.