I just acquired my second FF800, and I want to use the pair of them as an integrated recording interface on my Mac Pro.

I understand that the best practice for connecting two FF800's is to use ADAT/lightpipe cables from the second unit back into the first. I understand that if using all 28 channels, there's very little firewire bandwidth for the second unit anyway.

The questions are:

1) If I were to connect the front and back FW800 ports (which I assume are on the same buss) on the Mac Pro to the two FF800's, would I be able to use both over Firewire if I restricted the channel count to 12 (analog+SPDIF)? If this works at 44.1/24, would it also work at 96K?

2) If I were to get a separate FW800 card for the Mac Pro, wouldn't this create a second Firewire buss with additional bandwidth? If so, are there any PCIe cards that RME recommends (or knows to be successful)?

3) If I go with the best practice of connecting the 2 units using ADAT/lightpipe, how would I control the second unit if I cannot access it over firewire?

Thanks!

Pete