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Figuring It All Out
Feb. 6th, 2022 09:01 pmThe best laid plans...
The new two-meter long active Thunderbolt 4 cable arrived this morning, so this afternoon, I took it down to the studio to sort things out. This did not go as well as I might have hoped.
The first thing to do was to remove the old Thunderbolt 1 card from the Apollo unit and replace it with the Thunderbolt 3 card that I had picked up a while back in anticipation of getting all of the Thunderbolt stuff working. This meant another trip under the console to unship the old card and substitute the new one. And then I went to run the new cable through, which is when I realized that my calibrated eyeballs had failed me. The new cord was really no longer than the old Thunderbolt 1 cable plus adapter combination that I had been using, perhaps a fraction shorter. This was not really a fraction that I had to spare.
I pulled the computer to an incorrect (in the sense that it really can't stay there) position and managed to get the cable plugged in. The computer stubbornly refused to recognize the Apollo unit, although the Thunderbolt port was supposedly live. And I was annoyed.
Having swapped two parts, it was possible that either the board or the card was bad. It was also possible that the Thunderbolt port in the PC had decided to misbehave.
And then I realized that the new recording laptop has a Thunderbolt port. So I downloaded the Apollo software onto that machine, took it to the basement, plugged it into the Thunderbolt cable, and the laptop promptly recognized the whole assemblage.
Lots of reading of webpages ensued and eventually I managed to get the studio computer to recognize the Apollo unit again, although possibly on only one of the two Thunderbolt ports. I need to spend some more time investigating that, but I had long since used up all of the studio time for the day. And I wanted to test to see if the system was now going to let me combine the Thunderbolt Apollo with the Firewire Satellite in Cubase, which actually *did* work now.
The upshot of all this is that the computer is going to move back to the other end of the console in yet another round of rewiring everything, because I can't in any rational way get a longer Thunderbolt cable, while I have enough cables to wire everything else from the other end.
I think I'll do a better job of running the cables than the way they started though. :)
The new two-meter long active Thunderbolt 4 cable arrived this morning, so this afternoon, I took it down to the studio to sort things out. This did not go as well as I might have hoped.
The first thing to do was to remove the old Thunderbolt 1 card from the Apollo unit and replace it with the Thunderbolt 3 card that I had picked up a while back in anticipation of getting all of the Thunderbolt stuff working. This meant another trip under the console to unship the old card and substitute the new one. And then I went to run the new cable through, which is when I realized that my calibrated eyeballs had failed me. The new cord was really no longer than the old Thunderbolt 1 cable plus adapter combination that I had been using, perhaps a fraction shorter. This was not really a fraction that I had to spare.
I pulled the computer to an incorrect (in the sense that it really can't stay there) position and managed to get the cable plugged in. The computer stubbornly refused to recognize the Apollo unit, although the Thunderbolt port was supposedly live. And I was annoyed.
Having swapped two parts, it was possible that either the board or the card was bad. It was also possible that the Thunderbolt port in the PC had decided to misbehave.
And then I realized that the new recording laptop has a Thunderbolt port. So I downloaded the Apollo software onto that machine, took it to the basement, plugged it into the Thunderbolt cable, and the laptop promptly recognized the whole assemblage.
Lots of reading of webpages ensued and eventually I managed to get the studio computer to recognize the Apollo unit again, although possibly on only one of the two Thunderbolt ports. I need to spend some more time investigating that, but I had long since used up all of the studio time for the day. And I wanted to test to see if the system was now going to let me combine the Thunderbolt Apollo with the Firewire Satellite in Cubase, which actually *did* work now.
The upshot of all this is that the computer is going to move back to the other end of the console in yet another round of rewiring everything, because I can't in any rational way get a longer Thunderbolt cable, while I have enough cables to wire everything else from the other end.
I think I'll do a better job of running the cables than the way they started though. :)