Ferrofish Pulse 8 AE

This compact converter offers an easy way to expand your audio interface.

Ferrofish now have quite a range of A‑D and D‑A converters, and cater for a variety of digital connection protocols including MADI, ADAT and Dante. For review here is one of their smallest models, a half‑rack‑width device called the Pulse 8 AE, and it’s intended to act as an I/O expander for audio interfaces with ADAT ports.

Features & Operation

We’ll start on the rear panel, since the connectivity tells you most, if not quite all, of the story. Power comes from an included inline switch‑mode supply, which attaches to the device through a 2.54mm barrel jack. Thoughtfully, this has a screw‑on connector to keep the power cord firmly attached. Once hooked up to mains power, the Pulse 8 AE boots up in… well, let’s just say instantly, because while technically there may be a short delay, it doesn’t feel like there is.

Alongside the analogue and digital I/O are MIDI TRS sockets and a USB connector, to allow for connection to the RemoteFish control software and firmware updates.

The balanced analogue line‑level inputs and outputs (eight of each) are presented on quarter‑inch TRS jacks, with adequate space between them for the vast majority of jack connectors to fit alongside each other. There are also two pairs of ADAT ports for the digital I/O. Technically, you need only one pair for all eight channels, of course, but the ADAT protocol limits such setups to a maximum sample rate of 48kHz. The dual ports allow the device to use the S/MUX protocol to convert all channels at up to 96kHz (higher sample rates up to 192kHz are supported, but that halves the channel count). More unusual, compared with other converters, is that the Pulse 8 AE can act as a signal router that can address all the analogue I/O and the maximum of 16 ADAT I/O channels individually.

The Pulse 8 AE can sync with the attached device over the ADAT Lightpipe connection, of course, but there’s also the option of word clock, for which there are both in and out BNC connectors. This allows the Pulse 8 to act as the clock master or slave to another device, and in the latter scenario it can pass word clock along to a third device. Other rear‑panel I/O (whose functionality I’ll return to below) include MIDI in and out on mini‑jack connectors (fine by me; there’s no way DIN connectors would fit on this panel), a USB‑C port, and a larger slot reserved for future DSP expansion. There are not yet any current or promised expansions, but Ferrofish see this as a means of future‑proofing the unit.

On the front, there’s a headphone jack on the left, and the amp seemed to have plenty of juice in reserve when feeding my various headphones (I tried it with Audeze LCD‑Xs, Sennheiser HD650s and Audio‑Technica ATH‑W3000ANVs). It was good to see in the on‑screen menus that there’s the ability to limit the headphone output by up to 18dB below the maximum — basically this means you can set it up...