Connecting Multiple Motu Firewire Interfaces - MOTU Traveler User Manual

CONNECTING MULTIPLE MOTU FIREWIRE
INTERFACES
You can daisy-chain up to four MOTU FireWire
interfaces on a single FireWire bus, with the
restrictions described in the following sections.
Most computers have only one built-in FireWire
bus (even if it supplies multiple FireWire sockets).
Connect them as follows:
Mac
FireWire
FireWire
FireWire Word Clock Out
FireWire Word Clock In
FireWire
Word Clock Out
FireWire Word Clock In
FireWire Word Clock Out
FireWire Word Clock In
Figure 3-22: Connecting multiple Traveler's (or other MOTU FireWire
audio interfaces) to a computer.
I N S T A L L I N G T H E T R A V E L E R H A R D W A R E
Multiple interfaces cannot be bus-powered
Do not run the Traveler under bus power when
connecting it with other devices to the same
FireWire bus. See "Power options" and "Bus power
requirements" on page 20.
Multiple interfaces in the MOTU FireWire Audio
Console
The MOTU FireWire Audio Console displays the
settings for one interface at a time. To view the
settings for an interface, click its tab as shown
below in Figure 3-23.
Figure 3-23: To view the settings for an interface, click its tab.
Synchronizing multiple interfaces
For two
interfaces,
Mac OS X provides an advanced, flexible driver
slave one to
model that allows multiple Core Audio drivers to
the other.
be active at one time, accessed by multiple
applications simultaneously. For example, you can
You can probably
run both FireWire and PCI audio interfaces at the
get away with
daisy-chaining
same time, accessing all of their inputs and outputs
three interfaces,
from your host audio application — or even
although a word
clock distribu-
multiple applications — simultaneously.
tion device is
recommended.
A by-product of this more flexible model is that
This is risky. A
multiple devices must be synchronized to one
word clock distri-
bution device is
another in order to remain resolved to each
highly recom-
another. Without synchronization, the audio
mended.
streams going to each interface might drift with
respect to one another. For example, the audio
tracks playing back through the Traveler might
drift out of sync with the audio tracks playing back
through your 2408mk3 PCI interface.
Synchronizing them to each other ensures that they
remain as tightly and continuously phase-locked as
if they were operating as one unified interface.
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