Problems Using Multiple Firepods

[over-man]

Nice to be on the forum, I've been hanging around reading threads since I first heard about the site a few weeks ago, great stuff. I've frequented Apple's Logic Forum almost every day for the past year. Hopefully I can learn as much here as I have there.

I have a live recording rig that has been very unstable for the past 6 months or so. When I first got my 1.67 PB, 2g RAM, and Logic, the first 15-20 live recordings I made all came out perfectly. 16 channels running from the daisy-chained Firepods with a Lacie hd at the end, straight into the PB's fw port. Then, on one of my biggest gigs that included a hired camera crew, things went south for the first time.

I use the hardware monitoring on the pods, so during the show everything seemed fine. Afterwards, I realized some of the audio was noticeably shifted in time, things weren't in sync. Then, about half the songs were ruined by what I can best describe as strange digital artifacts/distortion. Not the type of distortion when you overload, but a crazy smearing of the audio.

Despite working with Presonus to evaluate the problem, I've come up with nothing. Sometimes it works ok, sometimes it doesn't. One pod seems to work fine by itself. I thought we solved the problem by using shorter fw cables, but after another ruined recording tonight its back to the drawing board. Tonight I was recording to a different Lacie drive, so I suppose it rules out the hd, unless its just both Lacie hds.... I was also running the chain into a PCMCIA fw card instead of the built-in port, as advised by Presonus. They recommend NOT using seperate FW busses for the pods and hd, but should I try this out? One of my Lacie's has FW800, i could use it with the card for the pods.

At this point I'm grasping at straws, trying to save my fledgling live recording business. Its a terrible feeling not being able to feel confident with your gear, especially in a live situation. I'm hoping someone has experience with this type of thing. I greatly appreciate any help or advice, even if its a fairly low-cost, more reliable alternative (the pods will work in hardware mode as 16 pres...). Hopefully I can contribute sometime soon as well.

[d_fu]

You need to physically sync the two devices' sample rate. Since the Firepod does not have Word Clock, the only way to do this is with SPDIF. Set one device to internal clock, pull an SPDIF cable from its output to the other device's input and select SPDIF as sync source. This should help.

[over-man]

Thanks for the tip, I'm off to the store right now to buy a SPDIF cable. Whats really frustrating is the fact that Presonus hasn't offered me half the solutions that other engineers have...