[James Richmond]

AX64 is Thunderbolt, not USB 3.

The way to connect these devices is over MADI, or Dante or ADAT.
One would be the Pro Mon master, the other would be slaved to it clocking off wordclock, or Dante or optical MADI, depending on what you want to do.

Maybe start with what you are trying to achieve?

In this thread and the previous one you’ve asked a few question without really being clear about what the use case is.

Do you simply want to add Thunderbolt to your studio?
In that case just wait for the TB3 card for the MTRX studio to come out.
They are, apparently, imminent.

But to your question, if you have two Avid/DAD Pro Mon capable products and are running a single control room then it would be usual to make one the master and one the slave unit.
As I said in the other thread you cannot have two devices being the Pro Mon monitor controller on one computer.

You designate one as the master and the other as the slave.
The slave clocks off the master.

With the AX64 and the MTRX Studio would make the AX64 the master (as it has a way bigger routing matrix) and serve up the MTRX Studio’s IO and Digilink channels to the AX64.
This is what I was previously doing with the AX64 and the MTRX I.

Now I have a MTRX II and an AX64 I designated the MTRX II as the master and the AX64’s IO is served up to the MTRX II using DADlink, but you could use Dante or MADI, or even ADAT if you wanted to.
Does this all make sense?

[James Richmond]

Yes the MTRX II supports DADlink, but maybe look into exactly what this is.
It is currently only for compatible DAD/Avid devices (AX64, Core 256, AX Center, MTRX II) with the MADI daughterboard and compatible SFP’s.

You can only have one Pro Mon device, in my case that is the MTRX II.

I don’t use AUX IO- the routing the MTRX II/AX64 is vastly superior.

I have TB3 on the MTRX II at the moment.
I don’t need it in both devices (MTRX II and AX64)- there is no point.
I use the AX64 to expand the MTRX II’s IO with zero latency between the devices.
That is the advantage of DADlink over MADI or Dante.

[James Richmond]

One one interface at once can be the Pro Mon monitor controller.
You can switch from one to the other easily but you don’t share Pro Mon between two devices.

The way you do it is to designate one device as ‘master’, make that your Pro Mon monitor controller, then serve IO from the second device up over MADI/Dante/DADlink (or AES, I guess).

I can’t think of a way to combine TB Channel count from multiple units without doing it via aggregate in Mac OS, which I wouldn’t bother with.

But it is easy to serve the slave unit IO up to the primary interface using DADlink- this is what I am doing.
The MTRX II is the master, the AX64 serves up its IO to the MTRX II over DADlink.

 

 

[James Richmond]

Do you mean 2x AX64’s?

Or an AX64 and another interface that is TB3 but not a DAD branded product?

If so, which one?

Are you looking to get more than 256 channels of TB?
You could use aggregate IO on a Mac but it is buggy and annoying.

I’m using an AX64 and MTRX II linked via DADlink and they work great with essentially no extra latency from the slave unit.

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