Need help understanding

[Kingme811]

I have a Focusrite Clarett 8 pre
I am getting a free DM 4800 from a friend.

I don’t honestly know if it has a FW card yet or not. Haven’t seen or picked it up yet.

Assuming it doesn’t, how do I connect my Clarett to the DM to get Focusrite Pres going through the DM?

Also can I use adat to do this?
If so will I be able to use the clarett pres and dm pres at the same time through adat without FW card?

Looking at pictures of it (I’m new to digital mixers) it doesn’t look like it has multiple outputs. Does it or not? Or is it asignable output you’d use for that?

 

[skier]

I have a Focusrite OctoPre and connect it using fiber through the ADAT ports - it works great! A critical thing to consider when making A /D and D/A conversions is the first piece of gear doing the initial Analog to Digital conversion. If you don't get a good A/D in the first place, you're stuck with whatever quality the conversion delivered to your storage drive, or you have to re-perform and record the track. Conversely, if the conversion is of high quality, you'll always have a high quality digital record that can be re-converted to analog if a prior one fails because of a questionable D/A conversion.

Fortunately, today's converters are better than ever and Focusrite is better than most, even in its less expensive gear, so this is not the issue it was in the past. Still, I always shoot for the best I can get with whatever practices I've learned, so I'm sharing that for your consideration.

Presuming you don't have other gear with conversions at this time, I would use the Clarett's clock as the master and the DM as the slave. This means the clock pulse will be transferred as part of the ADAT's signal via fiber. To do this, you'll set the Clarett as the master in its appropriate menu and set the DM as the slave in its appropriate menu by pressing the Project key and using the Clock tab.

However, if you later start adding other gear connected with digital cables and have A/D and D/A conversions happening in that gear, you'll want one clean master clock (e.g. Word clock) and slave everything else to it. The master can be the DM, one of the other pieces of gear that you feel has the best clock, or an external dedicated clock.

If the foregoing isn't clear, you need to learn a little about syncing the clocks of digital gear. Sweetwater has a short article to get you started that can find here:

Understanding Digital Clocking for Audio - SweetCare

In this guide, we will break down what digital clocking is and how it works so you know how to set up your audio gear the right way.

www.sweetwater.com

The Internet has a lot more such articles and some videos if you want more info. I hope this helps.

 

[cmaffia]

ADAT ports