Dear colleagues,
How would you set-up a clocking scheme for the following?

In the control-room, I have a laptop running Sequoia with a UFX + via thunderbolt.

Connected via MADI optical (duplex) to:

On stage, I have an RME Octamic XTC with a Grace M108 feeding its AES/EBU inputs.

My instinct is to clock the Octamic XTC off of the m108's internal clock via AES (or word).
Then clock the UFX off of the Octamic via MADI.

I've tested the above input-scenario successfully. However, I want to send talk-back from the UFX+ to the XTC (to it's headphone outputs) via a MADI as well. That's been unsuccessful thus far (octamaic doesn't seem to sync with its MADI input).

Any advice would be appreciated.

what sampling rate are you using?

reason i'm asking is that i've been (mis-)using two xtc's as format converters in a large install and everything works fine as long as i'm running at standard rate - when switching to double speed, the second xtc (which receives signals via madi exclusively) does sync but is having issues with channel routing, even when sticking to a 1:1 patch on the first bank of 8 madi channels....

(reminds me that rme hasn't been helpful/did not reply to two mails i sent?! - i guess i have to ring them up!)

Yes, in my experience, the most upstream device is the best clock. But not sure about talkback config.

96kHz

give it a try at 48k, just to find out whether you get the talkback going; i'm almost sure it will work (unless of course there's something else wrong...)

Hi,
Are you getting any audio from the talk back or out of sync kind of audio?

Just to make sure, a few things:

If you have the XTC in madi 1-8 and Grace in 9-16 and dont have any other channels in use, put the talk back to madi 17-18 and the phones feed from that.

Make sure the madi 17-64 (17-32 in 96kHz) is listening to madi (from XTC setup menu, in blocks of 8). Otherwise the phones wont hear a thing.

I have a setup of 3 XTCs which i run in 96kHz. The clock master is UFX+ or Madiface. The XTCs listen to madi and take the clock from it. It has worked well after all setups are correct.

Antti

Great suggestion. Thanks. I’m not getting any madi sync from the ufx to the xtc. I’ll try your advice next. Hopefully it is a sequential 8channel block issue.