pfft~ outlets

I am currently working with the phase vocoder tutorials. Which are truely amazing! The only thing I can't seem to get my head around right now, is outputting data from within the pfft~ subpatch to the main patch?

Is it simply not possible, because of overlap and thus multiple copies of the pfft~ subpatch? In the help file there is clearly demonstrated that using [out 1] should work.

I want to output the 'current sample location', using the output of either [sah~] or the [sampstoms~], why does max report:

"error:signal outlet (sah~) connected to nonsignal inlet (number~)"

when number~ HAS a signal inlet!?

Am I doing something wrong, please let me know!

Thanks.

ps. I am not uploading the patch because the problem occurs using the examples as well.