Linking two focusrite saffire pro 40s, is it possible?

S

Simian Drunk

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I'm looking into getting two of these so I could have 16 ins and eventually a third for twentyfour ins. My question is, would I be using the lightpipe to connect the two together and then one firewire to the computer? Or can you hook them together using the firewire ports? I can't seem to find the answer anywhere online, thanks in advance.
 
This is a yes and a no, one way you could expand that i/f is with an 8 way pre over adat the other is if you had multiple computers you could use a midi-time sequence to set a master slave sorta job to start and stop both / all as needed but directly using two / three interfaces even of the same type can be messy when possible
 
We're actually discussing this in my college courses now.

What you'd have to do is link one of the to the computer with firewire. Then you'll have to link the clock sources together by going from the Wordclock OUT of the firewire connected interface to the Wordclock IN on the next interface. This will make it so that you don't have jitter or problems with time errors from having to separate clock sources (two expand this to three, just go out the Wordclock out of the second interface into the wordclock in of the third). Make sure you set the clock source of the second interface to Wordclock as opposed to internal. This will link their clock sources together, but you don't have audio just yet.

Now you need to take the ADAT outputs of the second interface and bring those to the ADAT inputs on the interface that's connected to the computer through the firewire cable. Now you've got audio from both interfaces, and both of them will be synced to the same wordclock. =]
 
Yes, you'd use ADAT to link them together. Let the one connected via Firewire to the computer be the master clock. You might want to double check on linking three together via ADAT though - I'm not entirely sure linking three is possible with this unit.

EDIT: MrWrenchey beat me to it! :D
 
MrWrenchey said:
We're actually discussing this in my college courses now.

What you'd have to do is link one of the to the computer with firewire. Then you'll have to link the clock sources together by going from the Wordclock OUT of the firewire connected interface to the Wordclock IN on the next interface. This will make it so that you don't have jitter or problems with time errors from having to separate clock sources (two expand this to three, just go out the Wordclock out of the second interface into the wordclock in of the third). Make sure you set the clock source of the second interface to Wordclock as opposed to internal. This will link their clock sources together, but you don't have audio just yet.

Now you need to take the ADAT outputs of the second interface and bring those to the ADAT inputs on the interface that's connected to the computer through the firewire cable. Now you've got audio from both interfaces, and both of them will be synced to the same wordclock. =]
Click to expand...
Great, but Pro 40 does not have wordclock in/out (okay, there is SPDIF, but how many 8 channel pre's have spdif?).
I'd say get a little more expensive Saffire 56 with two ADAT in/outputs and wordclock connectors. Thats what i did. :)
 
Seidy said:
Great, but Pro 40 does not have wordclock in/out (okay, there is SPDIF, but how many 8 channel pre's have spdif?).
I'd say get a little more expensive Saffire 56 with two ADAT in/outputs and wordclock connectors. Thats what i did. :)
Click to expand...

S/PDIF has only two channels ADAT has 8
 
Thanks guys, what about then just pairing it with the octopre wich has the clock in it and syncing them together, since the 40 doesn't have clock, that seems like it might be better, and then would all the outs from both units still be usable? And when looking at the back of the 40 it has an optical in and out, could I just hook them together with that?
 
Wait... the Pro 40 has a clock in it... it has to in order for it to work at all. You can sync to the clock with ADAT as long as you run two ADAT cables between each interface.
 
You can link 2 saffire pro 40s together with firewire.

First 40 goes to computer, second goes into other FW port on that 40. You can also connect them into 2 FW ports on your computer if said FW ports are on the same FW bus.

Mix control allows you to independently control both saffires, and you can even name them for ease of identification.

The two saffire's will sync together automatically (clock), but you still have to set one as the master.

On top of having 2 synced saffire pro 40s over FW you can add external adat preamps. Let me be clear your total physical input channel count could be 36 if you had enough digital devices connected (it's 40 if you include the 4 loopback inputs).
 
You can actually do the above with any other saffire except the 56. So any of the little saffire's can be linked in the same way as above with a 40.
 
My only worry would be that all ADAT pre's don't have ADAT in. How do you send the wordclock sync then? You can't.
That's why I see the Saffre 56 as more futureproof.
 
The answer is you can't set the saffire pro to be the master clock, you have to set the saffire to get the clock from whatever you have attached (in the above scenario it would be the octopre) to the adat port.

So set the clock on the octopre to whatever, change the settings of the saffire pro 40 to sync to adat and you're done.

Do I think it was silly not to have a BNC connection for clock on the saffire? Yeah, but such is life.
 
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