I'm very new to RME products and have very little understanding of Word Clock. Even looking it up and reading into it confuses me a bit, but let me better explain what I'm trying to do here.
I have two PC's in my current setup, a desktop PC and a Surface Book (laptop).
I use my desktop for music production and other media production. I currently have it rigged with an HDSPe, which I run to an ADI-2, which runs to a Mackie ProFX12v2 mixer, and then to my studio monitors.
HDSPe>ADI-2>Mackie ProFX12v2>Studio Monitors
I use my Surface Book for Discord (voice chat). I currently have that hooked up to a Scarlett 2i2 (gen 1) interface which I run to the Mackie ProFX12v2, and then to the studio monitors.
Scarlett 2i2>Mackie ProFX12v2>Studio Monitors
Basically I've been on a long journey trying to build the perfect setup for both multimedia production (mainly music and video), and entertainment. When I'm not producing music I like to play games and ingest media. While I play the games on my desktop I use my Surface Book for voice chat. This allows me to individually control the volume of the game, the people I'm chatting with, and my own mic. I also directly monitor my own mic so I'm not yelling over the volume of my headphones. With all of this I don't have to constantly minimize games to adjust windows built in mixer and get a lot of other little benefits to running voice chat on a separate PC.
The setup I currently have works well enough but the Scarlett is really just a poor interface, I've had it for about 5 years so I can at least give it longevity but it has terribly low gain and ground noise I can't seem to get rid of. It doesn't even come close to the quality of my HDSPe / ADI-2, which makes sense considering it was 1/8 the price. I really didn't want to buy another RME card just for voice chat but I started to look around nonetheless. That's when I noticed the FFUC has USB and ADAT ports on the back of it and got thinking, could this replace both? I also use a DBX 286s as the ADI-2 doesn't have pre-amps, so could a FFUC replace all three of my external cards?
Basically in the end I'm looking to do this:
Desktop PC>HDSPe>
FFUC>Mackie ProFX12v2>Studio Monitors
Surface Book USB>
And then load the two MIC inputs, one input with a compression mic routed back to my desktop PC, and the other input with a dynamic mic routed to my Surface Book.
Will this mess with the master clock causing pops and jitters? Will I need to buy the Word Clock expansion board for the HDSPe and hook that up to the FFUC, or does there need to be another device in-between those? I mean will any of this work at all after getting a better understanding of it?
Sorry for the long post and thanks for the help.