A 5 Pin MIDI connection can transmit all 16 channels separately and simultaneously. The question is, if the receiving instrument can distinguish between the different channels (what should be called Poly Mode, IIRC), or not (what should be called Omni mode IIRC).
Usually not. You just have to make sure, all tracks are set to let the correct channel pass through.
ADAT and SPDif are both self clocking so usually no need for wordclock…
Welcome to the 80’s Steve. 
You’re making this far too complicated.
Here’s my setup:
Buy a MIDI patch bay like mine. If you’re patient you can find it on CraigsList or eBay.
Buy a bunch of MIDI cables.
Connect.
You’re done.
Each MIDI input and output shows up as a different port in Cubase.
The great thing is that you can substitute a laptop for the computer and use Cantabile Performer instead of Cubase and you have an easy to setup live rig too.
Actually this would be to avoid having to daisy chain, which is a severe pain in the arse. I suppose it could be used for PC to PC work too.
You can use MIDI-OX/MIDI Yoke to manage MIDI on the two PCs.
True up to a point. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. I tried this route before writing my own software and ultimately settling on professionally written software.
Years ago I had a Korg Poly 61m which only received in Omni mode, I had to use a little Roland midi filter to make it play nicely with all my other gear. From what I’ve read, you may have something like that going on. Getting a device which has multiple sets of 16 channels is probably your best bet. That was not an option back in 1984, at least on my budget!
No it´s not. SPDIF is purely audio.
ADAT does not carry any MIDI. ADAT is a digital multi channel audio interface / protocol
Congratulations, Steve! I love experiments and making stuff work! I bet you were cart wheeling round the house for a while when you realized it worked, didn’t you? 
BTW I wrote mySQL statements inside a Flash project via PHP and got data from a database displaying 100 visitors on the site in a flash movie the other day. I was cart wheeling the rest of the day … 
for those who care 
still just a skeleton, but it works.
Hm, I’ve still got a PIV 2.6GHZ which had a meltdown … or not? I don’t remember exactly what happened but I used it for the digital equivalent of “lifting boulders with a teaspoon” … not good!
Maybe I should see exactly what went wrong and … hmm 
lol, Steve … it’s great that you are working through this stuff, but you aren’t using old stuff in new ways, you are using the old stuff the old way. You’re basically just about to use your system like we did in the late 80s early 90s.
I think you should continue though. It will give you a lot of benefit on understanding communications routings. Then when you want to hook up all those computers, you’ll know what messages get sent to what, what they contain and what kind of processing they are going to need on either end.
Sounds like musician’ s writer’s block to me…
FLASH is dead 
need to do it in HTML 5 and javascript! But, congrats! That’s a big step in web dev.
Flash is not dead … it just smells funny. If you use it for a good reason it’s alive and kicking. If you use if for an entire site or to impress your colleagues everybody hate you for a good reason. Bad web designers ruined the reputation of Flash, but it’s such a great tool when you know it it will rise again one way or the other.
Actionsctipt 2 = javascript and actionscript3 = java to a large degree, and the knowledge of both makes it possible to do almost anything you can imagine, especially if you can draw and animate as well.
Flash is great for visual display of information like live feed of statistics where you can see patterns on a screen that is just not possible to digest from tables after tables of numbers. It’s very useful for B2B stuff … I hope 
You have all those tools in one authoring environment and if you know your way around it’s far from dead. I even made a “hello, world” in AIR for Android that popped up in my HTC phone haha. I haven’t tried but I think AIR is something you can us in iOS as well, which could be a bonus.
And HTML5/CSS3 is just the same as the old ones and jQuery/AJAX/JSON is just javascript under the hood, so I’m covered there as well! Standard webpages should use those tools because that’s what they are intended for …
How much off topic are we now? Enough to stop? Cool!
WHAT??? How can you say such a … well sorta kinda true maybe
But I’ve been doing lot’s of old songs in the evenings that are getting close to ready now!
lol, 5-pin was off topic by 3 decades …
I’d try to make premixes as you go and add track by track not caring about the mix to have the computer just play back files from harddrives instead of dealing with all the VSTi/VST. It’s the VST stuff that kills computers, but I guess you’ve figured that out. Then you can mix at a much higher latency, which you also probably have figured out haha! So I’ll stop now!
Can you imagine, on topic the entire post!