I am really not sure what that reply meant, even though your question was written clearly. First of all, as I indicated yesterday, this just does not seem to be what their manual says. Second, in his answer he seems to suggest that you can just plug a SPDIF source into the AES input, and that would just "work." As I have understood it, and I have spent some time reading about it, (as all of my DAT decks were SPDIF, but the R-4 Pro is AES) the signals are different, at different Ohms, and to truly convert data from one to the other can be accomplished with a cable that will harshly perform the function, or boxes costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars to properly do the signal conversion. Finally, he just said for "reference." Reference in their manual seemed to only be sampling frequency. I have seen nothing in there about word clock. Is this guy the senior tech? Hasn't anyone else ever experimented with this function. It still doesn't sound right to me, but give it a try (I would try to borrow the DMIC first, and find someone with an unmodded V3) and you can find out for sure.