FW Daisychaining interface and HD causes digital clipping

Hi all, I was undecided as to whether to put this here or in the music section, but felt it would be seen by more people here. Mods, feel free to move it.

I recently set up my Lacie HD and Focusrite Saffire pro 26io recording interface to daisychain off each other from the firewire port on my white macbook.

My macbook has a single FW 400 port, the pro26 2 FW400 ports and the Lacie HD, 2 FW800 ports. The set up I am currently using is:

Macbook - FW400 - Pro26io - 400-800 - Lacie HDD.

For reasons I can not work out, whenever i have sound coming out of the interface whilst the HDD is connected the sound is horribly distorted.

I have borrowed a second 800-400 cable to swap the pro26 and HDD around, but in this configuration my macbook can not see the pro 26 on the FW bus - only the HDD.

I have been running the HDD to my macbook via usb but would prefer to have it on FW. If anyone has any ideas as to what is going on, and how to solve it, I would be extremely grateful.

Cheers,
Stefan

Daisy chaining with FW or USB is not an exact science, and in my experience with it, gives unsatisfactory results. The only daisy chaining that I've seen work reliably is SCSI.

Having said the above, it appears the bad link is when going from FW400 to 800. Perhaps trying a different adapter might work. See this LINK.