Hi. Recently I’ve come into possession of a Firepod (FP10 equivalent) and a one-channel Digitube, and I know it’s going to be a challenge getting them to play nice with my Audiobox USB. All are fully functional on their own, but the project is to make them all fully functional within the same processing application (in this case, Studio One 4 on my iMac) simultaneously.
I’ve read about daisy-chaining firewire specifically, and b/g material on the various complications arising from mixed protocols generally. I’m aware of the multi-device aggregate option on Macs, but I have no real knowledge of how it actually works as a protocol, nor have I ever tried using it ITRW. Some general discussion of S/PDIF wouldn’t be out of place, as a matter of fact. Other posts touch on specific S/PDIF issues but I don’t see an overview, and literature in the wild is of limited value, I’ve discovered; a proper exploration of S/PDIF in a home recording context is surprisingly hard to find, even for a niche item.
In fairness, I don’t really expect success, not 100% anyway — I'm reminded of what used to be called “dependency hell” in Linux. We’ll call it "protocol hell”. Failing a complete solution though, I’d appreciate a variety of partial solutions that may favour one protocol at the expense of another, and an explanation why/when you’d choose that workaround. I don’t have a dedicated power amp set up yet so using that as relay node is not on, but I will have one eventually so don’t neglect that possibility.
For the benefit of casual readers, digital connectivity is as follows: Audiobox — 1 x USB 2.0 only; Firepod — 2 x Firewire 400 + 2 x S/PDIF; Digitube — 1 x S/PDIF only; iMac — 1 x FireWire 800; 4 x USB 2.0; 1 x headphone optical digital audio output (minijack); 1 x audio line in/optical digital audio input (minijack). They all have MIDI ports, except the iMac.
