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Quick setup before my question. Several external synths & midi controllers, 2 external fx proc's, 8x8 midiman, MOTU 828 MKII...

My analog IO on my MOTU 828MKII is full, so sometimes I want to route audio out of my DAW into my (for example) fireworx via S/PDIF and back in again. When I use my S/PDIF channel I have to change the clock in my DAW from Internal to spdif.
Why?
Nextly (new word ) I invariably forget to swith my DAW clock back to internal before I exit my host and later on when I want to listen to someones posted track here my audio is confused/disabled so I have to boot up the DAW again and reset. This sucks. Is there a way around it? Both fx processors accept incoming clock as well as internal clocking, and my midiman has smpte clock available.
What's going on here guys?

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dabmeister music Sat, 12/03/2005 - 10:45

Well, I'll say this as short as possible. When transfering digital audio, there's other info (data) being sent as well. Each digital I/O device has it's own internal clock. That clock (the AD/DA converters) if not sync'd to some sort of reference (usually word clock), will cause the audio to inherit phase issues, jitter, drop outs and other unwanted artifacts. A lot of us don't take advantage of these little (per say) master clocking devices that help stablize and rid our systems of these quirks. As I've found out, having a master word clock reference/syncing device, greatly improves sonic clarity, system stability & performance. In your case, you'll probably need to assign the DAW as the master and slave everything else. Personally, I've been checking out quite a few of these master clocks like the Apogee "Big Ben", Lucid, or something a little more affordable like "Antelope Audio Isochrone DA" from Sweetwater. Anyhow, just giving my 2 cents worth, maybe someone else can elaborate a little further on this too.