ADAT with Digi 002 Consoles – Don’t throw them away just yet!

So I got given a Digi 002 console version, which looks like this:

A fairly old style digital audio interface and mixer, which was all the rage back in 2002 when it first came out, but now is often found sitting in the skip. Why? Because it is a Pro-Tools inteface, and Avid stopped supporting it about 5 years ago, so it won’t actually work under Pro Tools and Windows 10 (believe me, I’ve tried!). It only works as a recording interface through Pro Tools, so you can’t just connect it via firewire to your PC and expect it to work.

It does have a stand-alone mode though, which allows you to use it as an analogue mixer, and that is pretty useful in itself if you want to drive monitors or record things from the master out. However after digging around on internet forums for a while, I figured out a way of actually using it as a recording interface! This is through use of the ADAT output, allowing you to plug it into a ADAT capable soundcard and record seperate channels over optical.

Caveats: it has to be 44.1khz sample rate, and you still have to use the Digi 002’s analogue to digital coverters in the chain, which are pretty old now!

If you’re willing to live with this, and I was considering what the console cost me, you get an extra 8 audio input channels in your soundcard! Well worth the effort I’d say.

To set it up with my Focusrite Sapphire 24 Pro, I followed the following advice from the Focusrite forum. This should work on most of the Sapphire range of soudcards.