Re: Cable
Correct, the shield (if it's a good one) and ethercons provide a Farraday tube (if that's even a term) allowing a charge to travel along the outer perimeter, kept in place by the electrostatic forces. The ethercon plug will ensure that there is a continous tubular path.
By having a common grounded supply with a shorter path, one can in many cases discourage the static discharge from travelling down the path of the AES50, and at least completely prevent any build up in potential between the units, leaving only the discharge of a body as a potential problem. Of course, it is exactly the discharge of a body that tends to be the culprit, when someone grabs a microphone or steps up to the console, but lots of solid ground is still your friend.
AES50 over fibre is still AES50 as such, and is available on the bigger Midas desks as well as on a couple of the Klark bridges and extenders.
https://www.music-group.com/Categories/Klarkteknik/Mixers/Mixer-Accessories/DN9620/p/P0ASK
I would imagine the problem is universal, the AES50 protocol and method of connection is the same.
I'd imagine it's hard to lose sync if you haven't got sync in the first place. I'd imagine it would be even harder to have static discharge down a non-existent cable.
You are probably referring to a solution where a ring is created, allowing more channels to be transferred between any two devices. Two consoles without any stageboxes naturally have two possible bidirectional paths of 48 channels, if you inject more consoles and stage boxes into this to create a ring, there is still 48 channels in each bidirectional path. S16 will forward anything it receives in port A, and anything received in port B will be shifted up by 16 channels. What you use the channels for isn't important.
Imagine you have 3 S16 in standard configuration connected to the monitor console (monitor connected to foh and foh connected to B-port of 3rd S16); anything going into the B port of the third S16 will have been shifted out of existence by the time you reach the A-port of the first S16, but in the other direction, assuming you are actually utilizing all 24 outputs of those S16, there will still be 24 channels available that you could take back to foh in addition to the 48 channels going down the usual path. Swapping things around, you could increase the number of channels going from foh to mon. Again, the purpose might vary, it could be to utilize effects in the second console as inserts or send return effects in the first console, sub-mix on the second console, record more than 32 channels utilizing two consoles, etc.
Sorry for my tardiness, not on here much these days 
~:-(~:sad:
