M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge

Although it’s not a brand new product, M-Audio’s ProFire Lightbridge is one of those things that make you wonder how you got on without it. With two knobs, a headphone jack, a power switch and some LEDs on the front panel, the Lightbridge probably won’t be the most exciting looking piece of gear in your studio. But looks can be deceiving, under the hood of the Lightbridge lurks a 34-in/36-out ADAT Lightpipe Interface making it the perfect connection between your computer DAW and your digital mixer. It connects to your computer via a single Firewire cable.

Let’s take a look at how M-Audio squeezes so many ins & outs into a relatively small box. Four ADAT optical inputs provide 32-channels and a S/PDIF input gives you another two channels, bringing the sum total of inputs to thirty-four. An additional four ADAT optical connectors provide 32-channels of output, a S/PDIF provides another two, and a pair of ¼” analog phone jacks bring the sum total of outputs to thirty-six. The analog-outputs are controlled by the Output Level knob on the front panel, making them perfect to feed a pair of powered monitors. The Lightbridge also has one MIDI in/out.

The ProFire Lightbridge supports sample rates up 96kHz. at up to 24-bit resolution. One thing to point out here is that if you plan on using 88.2 or 96kHz. sample rates, each ADAT port will drop down to handling four channels of audio instead of eight. This is due to the S/MUX mode of the ADAT interface and is normal. If you plan on running your audio at a high-resolution sample rate, the input/output section of the Lightbridge will be halved due to this.

MIDI in/out, S/PDIF in/out and Word Clock sync are all on a breakout cable which connect to the main unit via an RS-232 type connecter. With all this digital in and out, Word Clock sync becomes an important issue, and M-Audio knows this. The ProFire Lightbridge can act as a Word Clock Master or Slave, depending on your particular setup. The manual goes into a number of different scenarios, with diagrams showing where to connect things to make it work.

The front-panel of the Lightbridge is pretty simple and straight-forward. There is a panel of LEDs that communicate what’s going on with the unit, and what types of signals it is receiving or transmitting. Included in this panel are LED’s to indicate status of: Sample Rate, Sample Rate Multiplier (used in S/MUX mode), Sync Mode, MIDI signals, and Optical I/O Activity. These LEDs should make trouble-shooting easier in the event of a problem.

The ProFire Lightbridge can work with either Windows XP or Mac OSX. It’s always good practice to check for driver updates before setting up the unit to make sure you have the latest and greatest. It also works with Pro Tools M-Powered, however, is limited 18 inputs and outputs under it.

If you work with digital mixers and need to route signal in and out of the computer, the ProFire Lightbridge is a convenient way to do that. Its very flexible architecture means you can route just about any signal to anywhere else in your setup via your host DAW, making it a “digital patch-bay” of sorts. And since it can be bus-powered, the Lightbrdige would work well in portable applications as well. The ProFire Lightbridge is the perfect product if you have a lot of digital signals to route in and out of your computer.

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