I've been using my first 828mk3 for just short of a year and needed to add a little more I/O. So after talking to the guys at my local GuitarCenter I decided to get a second identical unit. Since both the MOTU site and the included manual said that multiple units can be daisy chained together I figured this would be rather straight forward. WRONG!!!
So here's the problem... I loaded the drivers (v3.6.8.1414) onto my machine (64bit Vista) and connected the first of the 2 and everything was grand. Connect the second unit and everything is fine until I open either CueMix or Cubase. As soon as I launch either of these two apps, the unit that is not the sync master starts flashing the clock sync indicator and then blue screens the computer. Each time it blue screens, the MOTU driver is shown as the culprit.
I've already disabled the onboard VIA fw chip and installed a card with a TI chip as well as disabled the onboard audio. When that didn't help I tried running each unit into a different port on the fw card. I've re-imaged the machine with the following OS configurations as well...
- XP Pro 32-bit
- XP Pro 64-bit
- Vista Ultimate 32-bit
- Vista Ultimate 64-bit
For both the 32-bit and 64-bit XP builds, I started with the vanilla version with no service pack with a test. When it failed I installed SP1 and tested then SP2 and tested. Each time I got the blue screen.
Thinking it could be the machine I also tried both my HP laptop (dv6885se) and my work Dell laptop (D820) and got the same result. Both machines running 32-bit OSs, one Vista and one XP Pro. The main system I've been trying to get this working on is an HP e9180f desktop. System has an Intel i7 920 cpu, 9GB of DDR3, and tons of drive space.
I've searched through as many of the topics in this forum that I could find that applies to this and noticed a number of people having similar issues but no solution that involves a proper fix from MOTU. I currently have one of the suggested setups I've read here in place which consists of running the ADAT outs from the second unit to the ADAT ins on the first. This is great and all but there's quite a bit lost when using this configuration. Primarily the ability to configure/modify the damn thing from a GUI not to mention the flexibility that 2 directly connected units would have. I've considered attaching the fw port of the second unit to my laptop just for the GUI but this is still a lame workaround and not even close to what MOTU says this thing should be able to do.
I logged a case with support and when there was no activity on the "techlink" I did the call/busy/redial. Once I finally got someone on the phone I ran down the issue with their support guy and walked through all the steps I've performed in troubleshooting and when it was all said and done I was given this as the answer. The problem is Windows... period. He said it couldn't handle the bandwidth needed and crashes because of it and if I want these to things to work together I'd have to run them on a mac. He refused accept that the problem was in device/driver and that since Windows has "so many problems" with firewire that this won't work. So basically these things are marketed as being able to do something but when it won't you're on your own. No offers to pass this on to the developers for a new driver, no offer to have the units sent in for a hardware check, nothing.
I find this bandwidth claim completely ridiculous for many reasons but mainly because one of the test scenarios included each unit connected to a separate fw interface through a different controller. I've managed to push a rather large stream of data from one external fw hdd to another fw hdd on the same box and never had the MOTU driver (or any other driver for that matter) blue screen the machine.
Has anyone out there managed to get 2 of these things working while both are plugged into the same box? I'm not exactly receptive to the idea of having to spend $3600 for a mac pro to get roughly the equivalent of what I have in this new HP for a third the cost.