clocking question

[songman]

HD3

2 192 Digitals (say A and B) <--32 channels of ADAT
1 96i <-- analog synths
1 Rosetta 800 for live recording and playback

1 Big Ben

1 XV5080 --adat --> 192 A 1-8
1 KSP8 --adat--> 192 A 9-16
1 RME Fireface --adat--> 192 B 1-16

How would you clock everything? I am unable to do it without getting digital spikes on the 192's. All 7 items have to be clocked.

Going nuts here!

[Andre Knecht]

1) Slave the three Digi interfaces to the Big Ben via Word Clock (I understand that Apogee recommends a star configuration — so do that).

2) Slave the Rosetta to the BB also.

3) If the Roland and Kurzweil accept external Word Clock, slave them to the BB. If they don’t, engage Sample Rate Conversion for their respective inputs on the 192(s).

4) The RME should accept WC, so repeat as above.



A) If you run out of WC outputs from the BB, you can feed multiple slaves via a single WC cable, using BNC “T” connectors. When doing so, make sure that only the last item in the chain terminates the WC signal — and be sure the latter actually does terminate).

B) Is the RME card installed on the same Mac or chassis as PT? If so, is that an accepted configuration? (I’ll defer to others on that.)


IHTH.

[songman]

Hello Andre,

Thank you so much for the comprehensive explanation and help. Trouble is, at the moment I am still waiting for the second digital 192 and the X_HD card for the Rosetta to arrive. So I cannot yet implement everything. But I will set things up as you suggested when the stuff arrives, should be next week.

The Roland and Kurzweil do indeed accept word clock. The RME is not connected to the same mac but to another mac running Logic (it is not a card but the firewire Fireface800 unit which has 16 adats). I run softsynths and effects (space designer mainly) on that 2nd mac and use it as an external effect and synth box with in-outputs piped via the RME's 16 adat in-outs to one of the digital 192's into protools. This setup worked like a charm with my mix setup, but I did have problems there too because of the combination of wordclocks and 256x clocking. Therefore in that configuration I was basically only able to clock the Rosetta from Big Ben and then had to do the rest serially and moreover had the KSP, the Roland and the RME clocked via adat. I hoped to be able to clock everything in a star from BB with wordclock in the present setup but so far I've not been able to do that without the problems I mentioned. One of te problems is the cumbersome setup of the Roland. You need to use an in-between box DIF-AT24 which connects via Roland's R-bus to the XV-5080 and which then in-and outputs adat. But there are many ways to clock all this (Roland can be clocked via wordclock, via adat or via the R-bus) and the same for the in-between box. It is a real mess at the moment so I am considering forgetting about the adats on the Roland and just use their analog outs and try to fit that into the setup, I can dump some other items to the RME making inputs free on the 96i.

Anyway, thanks again for your help! See what next week brings.