Now working with Reason to Scope at 96KHz, no Cubase - makes for a much improved workflow.  But first I needed a new way to connect PCI to XITE.  I found the S/Mux A radio button on Pulsar II Sample Rate dialog and voila it worked, ADAT at 96KHz ! 

After a couple of sessions the dreaded crackles came over ADAT - I have had the issue before with Pulsar ADAT so used Luna 2 ADAT instead. But Luna has no SMUX.  Rebuilding the PCI project or restoring it from a backup worked, but again crackles came back, but then I remembered some posts from Dawman about using AES/EBU at 96KHz so gave it a shot. Pulsar2 to XITE-1D via AES/EBU worked! Although it was with only one stereo pair that's all I needed for a couple of mono synths- synth-bass on left and lead on right.

See picture to the right. Although 44.1 kHz is selected, the 'Slave' button is also selected as is the AES/EBU as the Sync Source, and since the XITE-1D (as Master) is set to 96KHz, the sample rate shown for the Pulsar 2 is also 96KHz.

Seems to me a much more stable connection than the ADAT on my Pulsar 2.  Also seemed weird that once the crackles came it was embedded in PCI project - e.g. corrupted.  Rebooting and reloading the same PCI project still had crackles but rebuilding the project got rid of them for a while.

Anyway AES/EBU seemed the way to go for my particular setup.

Anyway the upshot of being able to use AES/EBU meant a set-up whereby a Scope PCI Synth could feed a Scope XITE-1D project which is otherwise performing nothing but mastering duties, all at 96KHz.  As you can see, the XITE-1D project is quite sparse, with only 5 devices that can run at 96Khz.  Mixing can be done with your favourite DAW  - in this case Reason since it allows a dynamic number of channels (I have used 60 channels) that can be either mono or stereo (also dynamically changeable) on its excellent SSL style mixing desk.

Dante March 2015