I'm trying to learn how MADI devices can be stacked.
 
It seems like a lot of MADI devices only have a single connection but are said to be "stackable". I'm thinking in terms of "daisy chains" with Ins and Outs, or Ins and Thrus in series and not quite sure how things work with MADI.
 
Do you need devices with two connectors or is there some type of special cable that has an extension built in to it?
 
Some "stackable" hardware allows for daisychaining an out to the next in until you return out to the MADI card.

Midi is a transfer protocol for sharing data between musical instruments, and can contain data that will set things like bank and preset information, along with note on/off messages and such.
 
You can access 16 midi channels, per port, and you can get a 'layered/stacked' sound by having multiple instruments in the chain set to receive the same midi channel, so if you have 2 physical devices and set them both to midi channel 3, and have a piano patch on the first device and strings on the 2nd, you will hear the sound of each playing, resulting in a layered sound of piano/strings.
 
For a more realistic sound though, I usually will keep things like strings separate, and use more sustained chords or notes for the strings than what the corresponding piano part might play, though that certainly would vary from song to song and from sound combinations of different instruments.
 
I don't know if that helped you in any way - thought I would give it a shot.  The midi IN/OUT/THRU and OUT/THRU are themselves pretty straight forward, and I gather from your post that you have those mechanics figured out.  :)
 
Bob Bone
 

Hi Bob,
 Thanks for the reply.
 
 I was asking about MADI, rather than MIDI. I've been using MIDI for about 20 years and I still don't know how it works. :-)
 
 I'm thinking about buying a SSL Alpha-Link Mx 16-4 in the near future.
 
 I was able to find the answer to how these particular appliances can stack by reading through the User's Guide 
 
 I'm not sure how other MADI gear works but I'm moving along on trying to understand a bit about it.

hope this doesn't muddy things...
 
MADI is described in AES10, if you are an AES member the standard is free. The current version was updated in 2008.
 
More to the point, MADI is basically a version of FDDI (more accurately CDDI), a 1990s era data networking solution that was used extensively for high capacity backbone circuits. It also worked well for building Metropolitan Area Networks, although it had competition from ATM - which was a mesh style network from the outset. FDDI was a ring topology network (actually a dual ring topology), but it could be extended to look like a mesh.

I suspect that extending MADI would largely be a function of the exact implementation used, in your case, by SSL, but since they were one of the original partners in the project (it was a joint venture between SSL, AMS, Sony, and Mitsubishi.)
 
My instinct suggests that you should be able to network several MADI boxes together... but I don't have any MADI boxes, so don't trust me!