[LAU] jack and the merging of soundcards

I may perspectively run into a shortage of audio inputs and stumbled across a blog, that reads like it is possbile to "merge" two soundcards into one virtual, that eventually looks as a single one to alsa. However, that blog does not mention jack. Also, in an stone old ardour thread Paul Davis suggests to a similar problem: ", then you simply get 2 digifaces", but again, this may have been before the rise of jack. And now I am wondering wether this is a possible or even reliable way to trick jack into being able to to finally handle more than one soundcard, if presented by alsa as being a single one. I am honest, that asoundrc is way beyond me, as alsa alway has been, thats why I am asking and I am thinking about using two ordinary, 1st generation, pre HDSP, Hammerfall cards to expand ADAT IO. Would be cheaper than investing into a raydat, when time has finally come. The posts for reference: http://soundofsyntax.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/how-to-configure-ubuntu-11-10… https://community.ardour.org/node/141 Any thoughts on this? Or won't it work with jack?