@PierreFunck said:
What I REALLY want to know is how the audio is routed from the slave to the main DAW computer: by LAN or by audio interfaces? Could you VSL people chime in? It would affect a couple of purchases I plan to do the next couple of weeks.
Could be either... If you're on PC, FX-Teleport does a very good job of doing this all on LAN, but it still only runs on Windows. If you have a Mac as either sequencer or slave, then you'll have to go with hardware (audio interface). If you're running Windows on both machines, go to fx-max.com and get the demo of FX-Teleport. If you've got one Mac and one PC, or two Macs, then I'd (personally) get yourself a pair of RME HDSP9652 cards. They're top quality, have 2 ports of midi and 3 ADAT lightpipe ports, wordclock, and they have totally stable and useable 64bit Windows drivers. The only bummer thing is that they're strictly digital, so unless you can use SPDIF out for monitoring, you'll still need some form of analog outs. Personally, I have the HDSP9652 on my slave PC, and an m-audio Profire Lightbridge on the Mac sequencer. This way I can get all the lightpipes from the PC, and monitor through the Profire. Of course, m-audio's drivers kind of suck, and the Profire is nowhere near as snappy, latency-wise, as the RME card (DSP). It's just a matter of how you need to monitor... If you have a digital mixer, or something, then the two RME cards would be brilliant. (In my old setup I also used an RME DIGI96/8 card for monitoring... I still have the card, so I may set that up again soon.
Hope that helps.
-- J.