I dont know what you mean exactly by "pairing".
If the FF400 has 2 Firewire Ports, then this simply means, that
- on one side you can connect the FF400 to the PC and
- on the other Firewire port you can add another Firewire device (Harddisk, etc)
I would more describe this as "chaining" multiple devices behind one Firewire controller port at the PC.
The question is, whether one Firewire Controller Port is able to handle the load of 2 FW400 recording interfaces.
If we look at the UFX, then 30/30 IN/OUT channels can be handled by FW400/USB.
If you have 2 FF400, then this is 36/36 IN/OUT
I do not have any experience than to say try it out.
The better solution is to get a FF400 card with 2 separate controllers and to attach each of the FF400 to only one controller.
I dont have the overview now, which cards could be feasible.
Maybe somebody else could tell his experience in terms of 2 x FF400, how to make this work best.
To pair^h^h^h^hchain a FF400 to a babyface ? USB behind a FW400 or vice versa ? How shall a mix of USB and FW go?
Not possible.
What you can do is to use the FF400 in stand-alone mode.
So you connect it one time to PC and configure it (routing).
Choose
- which of the 18 INPUTS of FF800 shall be routed to ADAT OUT
- which ADAT channels coming IN shall be routed to which of the 18 OUTPUTs
Connect the FF400 via ADAT to any other RME interface with at least 1 ADAT IN / OUT.
The standalone mode means
- you store wanted settings
- as soon as you power on the device these settings will be loaded
It stores: Samplefrequency, Clock Mode Master/Slave, Konfiguration of channels and digital I/O.
The whole state of mixer.
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13