| i believe the reason for this I/O limitation is that the firewire out ports are routed into the 16 channel strips so you can do analog mixes and summing straight out of your DAW... After looking at the pictures I can't seem to find any individual audio outs for those 16 channels, and indeed, looking at the block diagram reveals that the firewire out is fed into the channel strips (switchable).
You could then use the inserts I suppose if you wanted to get that audio back out, however you couldn't do 16 channel bi-directional as you need a free channel strip to get that audio back into your DAW, which would take switching the channel strip input mode... |