Richard Crowley wrote:

With the availability of the 8-chan decoding chip, it isn't
neurosurgery to design a piece of hardware which takes
the ADAT optical in and feeds 4 pairs of audio streams
to the operating system (assuming one can write the proper
driver. This seems like more of a software (OS driver)
issue than a hardware one.

Oh, it's very much a hardware issue. You have to put it in a box, put
connectors on it, and power it up. That might not cost you very much if
you were building one in your home workshop (just like it doesn't cost
very much to record a CD in your guest room), but if it's going to be a
commercial product, there's a bunch of manufacturing engineering that
has to go into it (assuming you don't want it to cost $1,995) as well
as design, specifications, test, and the all important marketing. But
first they need to be reasonably assured that they can sell enough to
make them cost what it takes to sell enough of them.

Like I said, I don't see that there's much of a market for it. People
who have really nice converters and preamps probably would prefer to
work at a higher sample rate than 48 kHz (or at least would want that
option) which the standard ADAT optical interface doesn't accommodate.
And if you want to use a couple of Behringer ADA8000s as the front end,
you probably don't want to spend more than about another $200 to hook
them up to the computer. Maybe Behringer can do it. Ask them.