new gear, new rack, new wiring problems, advice welcome

[Matt Darcy]

I've just finished getting all the gear I need to make a big upgrade/change to my recording rack.

While the upgrade is good, it's made me re-consider how a few things where wired up, and actually forced me to re-write a few thing due to change in configuration/devices. With that in mind I'd certainly appreciate some advice on a few things and actually as a few questions that where clear in the old setup - not so clear in the new.



I'll try to give a summary of the major old -> new change.

I've swapped out a Digidesign rack 003 that was connected to a pair of Ocotpre's via light pipe to give me 16 inputs that is now replaced with a Apogee Ensemble Thunderbolt connected to a Focusrite OctoPre MKII via light pipe to give me the 16 channels of audio.



Question 1.) the old setup the external pre's where connected to the rack 003 via lightpipe nice and simple, 1 cable to connect the rack 003 to the ocotpres. In the new setup the Ensemble AND the MKII Octopre's have in and out sockets. do I have to make a loop, or as I'm now just using 1 external device, can I just put the "out" of the Octopre MK II into the "in" on the ensemble ?



Question 2.) I dropped a Kemper into my setup, in the previous setup I just used the Kemper XLR out's to 2 inputs on the rack 003 that simple, however I'm considering using the SPDIF connection as the Kemper guys all say this works better for the Kemper, is this as simple as kemper spdif out -> ensemble spdif in, and ensemble spdif out to kemper spdif in - do I need to close the loop on this ?



Question 3.) based on question 2 this causes a problem, as I use a Lexicon 400 reverb for adding a little effect here and there, I used to connect this to the rack 003 via spdif and use it as a hardware plugin within pro-tools, however if the kemper is using this, I can no longer do it this way. Reading the Ensemble's manual it seems like inputs 1 and 2 have a send and return each for devices just like this, so I have an XLR input for inputs one and two and 2 jacks too for send/return for outboard effects for each input. Great, this looks like it will work just the same, however the Lexicon outside of spdif seems a little more complex to my basic use, in that there is a left and right channel - no problem, but also front and back, so do I use front or back output/input on the left/right channels to go to the send and return on channels one and two and the ensemble ? does it matter ? manual on the lexicon is a bit sketchy in regard to explaining this.



any advice or general comments on the questions or what I'm doing in general, flaws, better ways etc would be most welcome.