No more stdm connections/3cards

ThomasT · Post by **ThomasT** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 6:54 pm

Hallo!

I have 3 cards now.
A pulsar I, an 4 DSP SRB and now a pulsar II.
Connected with only one stdm cable.

Whats' the best configuration? At the moment I only put the pulsarII to my old 8DSP system and I get a "no more stdm connections" error.
Should I connect the pulsar I and the SRB with an extra stdm cable to the pulsarII?

I remember there was an error didn't know with. I think it was "no routing to from board0 to board2" or similar.

My project consist of two pulsar mixers in chain, and 28 ASIO channels.

In every channel is a sonic timeworks EQ inserted, in the half
of the channels an additional st compressor and in 12channels external FX routed via ADAT of the pulsarI.

It's a test project. I use only 80-90% of DSP usage but when I try to load inserts into the second mixer I got this message.
Is it not possible to work on such a large project?

alfonso · Post by **alfonso** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 7:27 pm

You only can use one cable, as the gen.1 cards have only one stdm connection. If you had 2 gen.2 cards and a gen.1 card you could use one cable for all three and another one for the 2nd connector of 2 of them.

I think that reaching the 80-90% of dsp load with no errors in a system with two gen.1 cards is pretty good, more stuff is likely to be an excessive load for a single stdm bus....

blazesboylan · Post by **blazesboylan** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 9:04 pm

It's worth trying to move those ADAT connections to the Pulsar II card, if you can. You'll find that sometimes the card with the most DSPs can handle a bit of extra load, and that will cut down on the need to fire data back and forth across the S/TDM bus.

Cheers,

Johann

ThomasT · Post by **ThomasT** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:52 am

Thanks. I try to connect the ADAT-IOs to the second board.

Shall I renumber the boards in the ini-file?
To make the pulsarII to board 0 instead of board 2?

Why it it not possible to use both sdtm connections?

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 11:46 am

Move the effects outside of the mixer. When an effect is loaded inside, it is locked to the same card as the mixer. So you cannot run a mixer with insert effects worth 9 dsp, but you can put them outside for more flexible DSP use.

blazesboylan, yes it's best to choose IO on the card where your mixer resides. For example, locking mixer to the Pulsar2, which also hosts the ASIO drivers and hardware IO, can save a bunch of STDM bandwidth. It depends on your projects, but there's a bit you can do to optimise the allocation of DSP use etc.

As a hardware optimisation, you can put the Pulsar2 in the middle of the 2 Pulsar1's. Reason behind this: most IO and routing on the center card avoids excessive traffic from the top to the bottom card, this spoils like double bandwidth.

I had the same setup 2 years ago when these errors annoyed me that much that I got a Scope SRB instead of the 2 Pulsar1's. There's a reason why they put more STDM on the second generation cards...

blazesboylan · Post by **blazesboylan** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 3:18 pm

Locking effects to the board is exactly what you want here. The problem is not lack of DSP, it's lack of S/TDM bandwidth between the cards. Letting the effects wander between DSPs won't alleviate the bus bandwidth problem -- this approach may even make it worse.

Putting the PII card in the middle S/TDM cable slot sounds like a great idea.

The renumbering you mentioned is recommended in the manual -- so that the highest DSP card is card # 0 -- though to be honest I don't know whether it will make any difference for bus bandwidth issue. It may even cause more problems since the PII card would spend its DSP cycles managing, and therefore less actual processing could be done on it -- forcing the P1 cards to take up the load. Thus necessitating high bandwidth data transfers across the bus. (That's my crackpot theory and I'm stickin' to it!

)

You might also consider using the 8 buses and the aux buses on the mixers, rather than individually EQing and compressing and effecting everything. For example, you might have a bunch of drums or synths that can be put onto a single stereo bus, then slap EQ and compressor into the bus's inserts.

FWIW I usually put EQ on each individual channel (if / where necessary), and compress the buses. With drums I'll often send cymbals to a clean bus (or straight to mix), and either lump the rest through a single compressor, or divide up into separate buses (bus 3 = kick, bus 4 = snare, buses 5/6 = toms).

And out of curiosity, why the 2 mixers?

Cheers,

Johann

ThomasT · Post by **ThomasT** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:09 pm

>And out of curiosity, why the 2 mixers?

One Mixer have only 24 Tracks. That's not enough.

I think I have to play a little bit.
I will make the PII to my "master card" meas it get the sync plate and all ADAT connections.
Today its the PI card.

Post by **garyb** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:56 pm

that's right, the bigger, newer card should be the first card.

blazesboylan · Post by **blazesboylan** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 1:56 am

On 2004-10-26 19:09, ThomasT wrote:
One Mixer have only 24 Tracks. That's not enough.

Get the Mix'n'Master pack! You can even spring for the upgrade right now and get the extra mixers plus extra bus bandwidth all in one shot.

(Mix'n'Master gives you the 48/96 and 48*S mixers.

It is definitely worth the ticket price for all the plugs you get!)

ThomasT · Post by **ThomasT** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 8:44 am

1. What upgrade do you mean?

2. I normally use a hardware controller for the pulsar mixer and even for one mixer I run out of midi controllers! On a second mixer I can use another midi channel.

I need at least Fader, 1 Aux, Solo and Mute button midzied for each channel.
So 4x24 are 96. That's 98 inclusive master fader and talkback button.

Or has creamware changed this restruction to 100 controllers/device?

blazesboylan · Post by **blazesboylan** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 9:17 pm

1. What upgrade do you mean?

Upgrade special for Pulsar 1 users

Or has creamware changed this restruction to 100 controllers/device?

120 MIDI ccs can be assigned per device. MIDI ccs 120 - 127 can't be assigned.

So you could have 30 channels x 4 controls = 120 total, for example, with the 48 channel mixer.

Anyway just a thought... Cheers ThomasT,

Johann