Skylake Thunderbolt 3 for Music Production

[joevt]

1st) TB3 and 3.1/USB-C are not the same at all, even though they look similar.

Thunderbolt 3 is an alternate mode built on-top of USB-C. Thunderbolt 3 has to follow certain standards to use the USB-C port.

You cannot plug a TB3 cable into a USB-C/3.1 port (or the other way around) and expect it to work - in fact, in some cases you may even cause damage to your equipment due to the voltage supplied via the TB3 port.

This is not true. USB-C cables and USB-C ports follow certain standards to prevent damage. Research the Power Delivery specification, part of the publicly available USB specification. Also research the USB billboard device class in the same USB specification. A USB-C cable has a chip that describes it's capabilities to the port. A USB-C device using an alt mode has a chip that describes the alt mode (in this case, Thunderbolt). A USB-C port can query the device for it's supported modes, and can choose a mode that it supports (modes include USB, USB+DisplayPort, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, MHL; a vendor can register other alt modes). If a mode is not supported, a USB-C device may have a billboard device (a USB 2.0 device) that describes the device so the OS can display a message to the user. Voltages don't happen unless the device and port agree on the power requirements using the Power Delivery specification. A port of a computer can be a source (for powering a device) or sink (for charging the computer) for power. This is negotiated using the Power Deliver specification.

 

[stringsibanez]

Maybe someone in this thread can help me out with this:

I have an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard with an i7-7700K, a Gigabyte Alpine Ridge 2.0 Thunderbolt card, and OS X Sierra 10.12.6.

I recently bought two Slate VRS-8 interfaces and while they both show up in attached devices under Windows 10 (and work fine), I do not see any evidence of the in OS X. (Connect via Startech TB3-to-TB2 converter and then to the units).

I have been trying to sift through this and other threads, but I have yet to find anything that points toward a solution (at least that I've been able to spot or understand). A few posts in the thread mention that connecting device changes "no hardware detected" to "no drivers are loaded" which I have also observed, however, I am unsure of what steps I might now be able to take.

Any advice, suggestions, or aid would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.