"I have to run an ADAT light pipe signal from the tape machine rack about 50 to 60 feet over to where my MOTU DAW will be. I've heard that TOSLink signals can't be run that far. What should I do?"

Getting TOSLink signals to go much beyond 30 feet can be a tricky proposition, but it will sometimes work up to about 50 feet. What you need is a repeater to regenerate the signal for you along the way so it arrives in tact. Simply run 25 or 30 feet of cable to the repeater, then another 25 or 30 from there to the destination. There are a variety of low and high cost solutions for this. If all you need to do is transfer tracks, as opposed to keep the two systems in sync with one another on an ongoing basis, a low cost unit (such as the M-Audio Co2 we sell) will be fine. The problem with TOSLink in general, and certainly aggravated by long TOSLink runs, is jitter. For transfers you are only concerned with getting data from point to point, and jitter isn't really a paramount concern. If, on the other hand, you are converting from analog to digital or vice versa, with a lot of jitter you are certainly compromising your audio quality. To be clear, once the data is transferred you can revert back to an internal or other non-jittery clock source and be just fine. If you really need to get the audio that far with extremely low jitter you may want to investigate an AES/EBU transfer, or a dedicated master or house sync clock source for your whole studio, which can greatly improve audio quality (at the converters) and make transfers of all types go more smoothly. Your Sweetwater Sales Engineer can help you with the particulars.