Hi,
First of all, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had some problems with your Clarett and have indicated that you were going to return the unit. If you’ve decided against returning it and would like any assistance getting everything up and running, or if you’ve had any problems trying to return the unit please get in touch with us directly and we’ll do everything we can to assist you: http://focusrite.com/answerbase/contact-0
To clarify, connecting a Clarett certainly should not force your Mac to shut down/crash (and we’ve not had any other reports of that occurring), nor should you need to use the ‘Restore Factory Defaults’ option in Focusrite Control in order to get started.
Having read through this thread I thought it might be worth clearing up a few things about Thunderbolt in general versus other connections. As mentioned in this thread, the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 1 is 10Gbps (the Clarett range are all Thunderbolt 1 devices) which is double the bandwidth of USB 3.0. This level of bandwidth is not ‘necessary’ for typical audio use - even when using every channel on our largest Thunderbolt interface (the Clarett 8PreX) at 192kHz/24-bit you will not get anywhere near this limit.
A major advantage of this is that bandwidth therefore does not need to be considered as carefully as it does when using USB 2.0/FireWire devices since it’s far more unlikely that you’ll ever reach that threshold, even with multiple Thunderbolt devices connected to the same bus. Though the Clarett range only have a single Thunderbolt port per device, they can still be ‘daisy chained’ by being placed last in the chain. We have tested with the Clarett last in a chain of up to six devices and found no problems at all - depending on the devices in use and how much bandwidth they are using, you may be able to connect more/fewer than this.
This is simply not possible with USB 2.0 or 3.0, since daisy chaining is not a part of the specification for those protocols. While it’s possible to daisy chain FireWire devices, the bandwidth is far more restricted and you will likely encounter problems if you try to chain more than two devices together on the same bus (and you may encounter problems even with only two devices depending on how bandwidth-hungry those particular devices are).
The second major advantage of Thunderbolt for audio purposes is the lower levels of latency that are achievable using this protocol. Thunderbolt connects straight through to the PCIe layer, as opposed to USB which must go through a number of stages first (each stage adding additional latency).
Latency of less than 10ms is typically inaudible to most people, though the lower the latency the better when recording as even lower latency than this can still put off some performers.
Many USB and FireWire devices (including our Scarlett/Saffire ranges) get around this problem by introducing a direct monitoring feature to the setup, which allows the user to monitor the signal ‘pre-DAW’ (i.e. directly through the hardware without any additional software processing).
With the Clarett range, this is essentially not necessary in most scenarios (though it is a feature included on the Clarett range) since the round-trip latency (the time it takes for an signal to be converted to digital, be processed by the DAW and then be converted back to an analogue signal) is so low that it is undetectable. This allows you to not have to spend additional time setting up mixes outside of your DAW for your performers, as well as allowing them to perform while hearing the effect of any plugins or processing inserted in the DAW.
I hope that this clears up any misconceptions about the Clarett range and Thunderbolt in general, as mentioned please feel free to get in touch if you require any further assistance: http://focusrite.com/answerbase/contact-0
Best regards,
Jack // Focusrite Technical Support
