If you have two DS2416 cards installed, these can be connected using the SI/SO (Serial In/Out) connections on the cards, giving you access to integrated 48-channel mixing with 4 separate on-board FX units.
1. Use the supplied serial cables to connect the SO output on card A to the SI input on card B, and vice versa.
The two cards should be connected “both ways”. Follow the instructions in the documentation that was included with the cards.
2. Open the Output Patchbay window.
This will now have two additional columns containing output routing and wordclock settings for the second card.
3. Select the “ext. SI” option in the Wordclock section for one of the cards. This will cause one of the DS2416 cards to receive wordclock from the other card, ensuring stable synchronization. In effect, the card for which you activated the “ext. SI” option is now the “Slave” and the other card is the “Master”.
Once you have connected the two cards as described above, there will be 16 Output Buses in the VST Master window, and 8 Input pairs in the VST Audio Input window. Furthermore, the Input Console will hold the double number of channels (40 input channels, 8 effect return channels and two Stereo Mix channel strips).
• There are 32 separate “lines” from Cubase VST to the DSP Factory (sixteen stereo Output Buses).
By default, VST 1 to 16 are assigned as inputs to DS Channels 1 to 16, and VST 17 to 32 are assigned as inputs to DS Channels 21 to 36.
DS 2416 Master DS 2416 Slave Bus Aux Stereo Bus Aux Stereo Bus 1 - 8
The Buses, Aux Sends and Stereo Mix on the Slave card will receive the signals from the corresponding buses on the Master card, and the signals will be summed. In the opposite direction, only Aux Send 3/4 from the Slave card will be connected to the Master card’s Aux bus. This makes it possible to access all four FX units from all channels, as described below.
Due to this routing, it is not possible to record on all sixteen channels simply by using the buses. Instead you would need to route the eight Buses on the Slave card to VST Inputs 1 to 8, and route the Aux Sends and Stereo Mix on the Master card to Inputs 9 to 16.
When you have two DS2416 cards installed, the Aux 3-4 Sends will automatically be routed to the FX Unit on the Master card. All DS channels (regardless of which card they “belong to”) can access all four FX units.
In the FX Editor, there will be four options on the “FX Unit” pop-up menu, labelled FX Unit 1 to 4. Aux Sends 5 and 6 are routed to FX Unit 1 and 2 (as with one card), while Aux Sends 3 and 4 are routed to FX Unit 3 and 4.
P Do not route the FX Return channels to Aux Send 3-4 - this may cause a feedback loop. If you have a Yamaha SW1000XG sound card installed, you can connect it to the DS2416 card using the SI/SO (Serial In/Out) connections on the cards.