I was just wondering if any of you successfully use two or more firewire audio interfaces (not daisy chained, but both directly connected to computer), for the purposes of gaining more ins and outs?

assuming they are the same brand / make / model? some makers allow for such things in their drivers.. e.g. combine 2 of the same unit's to work under asio.

like with the motu's years ago.. they had a pci card slot, but you could plug 3 into that card.

or at worst you could use wdm more.. you'd have to contact the maker to make 100% .. remember sonar and any other sequencer is only using what it's given to work with.

ORIGINAL: jlizerbram

I was just wondering if any of you successfully use two or more firewire audio interfaces (not daisy chained, but both directly connected to computer), for the purposes of gaining more ins and outs?

You should be able to. But there are some things to consider. If they are the same brand you need to find out from the vendor if their drivers will operate both as one system and if their software mixer covers both. Also, if you need a sample rate clock connection or if the driver is custom made to provide for this.

If they are not the same brand there are a few things to consider. First you can't use ASIO as your driver type. ASIO only supports one driver active at a time. This is not a Sonar limit, it's an ASIO limit. So you will want to use WDM. Next you will need to make sure only one of them is the source of Sample rate clock and set Sonar to use that as it's record and playback timing master. Then connect some type of digital connnection to the other one and set it to get clock from that input. Word clock is made just for that or you can use SPDIF, ADAT, or AES/EBU... what ever both devices have. All those are single direction only so you would connect the "out" of the main one to the "in" of the one that gets clock from the main one.

The next task is how to set up monitoring. You can use an analog or digital connection from one to the other just like you would with two mixers in a live setup. If you use input monitoring you won't have to do this but if you use the software mixer of the devices to setup zero latency monitoring you will, at least to get sound (sub mix) from the second one to the main one.

ORIGINAL: ohhey
First you can't use ASIO as your driver type. ASIO only supports one driver active at a time

Frank, there are a few exceptions to that rule though.. but the "norm" is one card, but others allow chaining.. (obviously the same make / model of card)

Frank, there are a few exceptions to that rule though.. but the "norm" is one card, but others allow chaining.. (obviously the same make / model of card)

Yep, there are a few multi-device ASIO drivers out there, but normally it's one at a time.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb06/articles/pcmusician.htm

ORIGINAL: Fog

ORIGINAL: ohhey
First you can't use ASIO as your driver type. ASIO only supports one driver active at a time

Frank, there are a few exceptions to that rule though.. but the "norm" is one card, but others allow chaining.. (obviously the same make / model of card)

Yeah... I like to be crisp and say the limit is one "driver" at a time not one "device" at a time. So yes... in the case where one driver can operate more then one deivce you can do that. I think ASIO4ALL can do that with some cards and some vendors offer that in their line of deivces, at least for some models.

I was just wondering if any of you successfully use two or more firewire audio interfaces (not daisy chained, but both directly connected to computer), for the purposes of gaining more ins and outs?

Daisy chaining would be the correct way in most cases and they need to be the same make and model. If all you want is more inputs, get a pre-amp with digital outs and hook it up to your digital input of your sound card. Its an easy way of adding 8 preamps with no headaches.
Cj

Well, I tried it, and the results were not pretty. This was done by connecting two same-make Presonus Firestudio Projects. The Firecontrol application did show both units, but only allowed control over the master. And Sonar allowed me to select any of the 20 inputs and outputs, which at first, I thought was great! However, upon playback, it became very unstable. No dropouts, but very distorted, motoboating sound. Not on every project, but on about 1/2 that I opened. This was done in WDM mode. ASIO just didn't work at all.

The next task is how to set up monitoring.

Also, Frank was right about the monitoring challenge. While I could record the input from the second device, there was no output through the main monitors from the first obviously, because I did not have them digitally connected.

I will try daisy-chaining method with ASIO as presonus suggests.

By the way, of you forum members, what is the most amount of simultaneous discrete channels have you have recorded, and what kind of audio interface(s) did you use to accomplish that? I'm trying to gain more simultaneous channels for full band live recordings - all I have really is 8 channels now with the presonus fs project.

thanks, guys.

how many channels is determined on your pc and if your using effects with input monitoring. with straight recording and a good pc, you can get 16 discrete channels at one time. There are allot of variables to this. If your recording a band, you wont need low latency, so set it higher to relieve the strain of your cpu when recording a band and not using input monitoring with effects

Has anyone tried to use the ASIO4ALL driver to accomplish this task? A buddy hooked up 2 different firewire devices and successfully recorded multiple drum tracks but said that the recorded audio offset was different for each of the 2 devices. Once he manually aligned the tracks using obvious transients (as there was some microphone bleed) he was good to go.

Edit for clarification. Buddy had a firewire card with 2 inputs. Not sure if that's what the OP meant by "not daisy chained", but I think it's really the same thing.