MOTUnation.com

hi. i have a location recording session coming up rather soon and i'm going to need a fair bit of multitracking beef.
So my questions are; how many channels can i get into my DAW using an 828mk3 as the primary interface, taking into consideration daisychaining via f/w and both channels of ADAT.
Also, how many channels of audio are theoretically possible over a 400mbit/s firewire line? any figures based on 44.1khz 24 bit would be great.
How much of what i am trying to do is based on the power of the host pc? i am guessing not a great deal as my laptop has a 7200 rpm drive which would easily outperform the firewire transfer speed.

thanks guys, tim.

There are limitations to the daisy chain capacity. The manual states that up to 4 firewire MOTU's can be linked, and usually up to a max sample rate of 48khz (the higher sample rates are sacrificed for quantity of channels. Regardless, I would do an extreme amount of testing on the system prior to the recording if you haven't run multiple MOTU's before. It can be a real pain. Do some searching around here for "multiple", "daisy chained", "sync", "squeal", "dropouts" and you'll see what I mean.

For a test, I would run a sine-wave test tone into all channels that you intend on using and recording for about an hour paying close attention that there aren't any dropouts in the recording or playback.

thanks for the response! i have had no trouble running an 828mk2 via f/w daisychain.. but you're right, and i would definately stress test the system before the session. By what you've said about the MOTU spec i could run a theoretical 56 channel system (40 through daisy chained F/W and 16 via the host 828's ADAT.) i wonder if it is possible to use the 16 channels of ADAT on each daisychained device.. this is cleary going to put huge stress on the f/w bus but if it can handle it the track count would be 104! hence my question how many channels is it theoretically possible to run over firewire?

I really doubt that you could run all of the onboard channels plus the ADAT as well. You can only squeeze so much through a pipe. The manual for your MOTU unit should tell you exactly how many channels you can run in various configurations. Good luck.