[LAD] Is RME HDSPe AES supported by alsa?

Reuben Martin reuben.m at gmail.com
Wed May 5 22:55:09 UTC 2010


Yo, back on Wednesday 05 May 2010 Florian Faber was all like:
> Reuben!
> 
> > On the upside, ALSA exposes all 64 matrix inputs that are available
> > for the matrix. I believe (not for sure) that on windows systems, only
> > the first 16 are exposed. So instead of the advertized 16x16 matrix, you
> > have a 64x16 matrix.
> 
> What 64 channels? The card only has 16 input channels.
> 
> 
> Flo
> 

Inputs to the card's matrix, not inputs to the card itself.

If I remember correctly the matrix has 128 inputs, the first 64 are reserved for hardware inputs (on this unit, only the first 16 are actually used by the card inputs) The last 64 are reserved for OS audio sink inputs There are 64 outputs from the matrix for the card outputs (again, on this card only the first 16 of them go anywhere)

Alsa exposes all 64 matrix inputs as alsa ouputs, and I don't think the windows driver does that. (Never played with the windows driver, so I may be wrong about that)

IIRC, they put such a huge matrix on it because they designed one chip to slap on all their cards in that family. Saves money to just design and fab one chip instead of a separate chip for each unit.

-Reuben



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