[linux-audio-user] External audio interface (edirol FA/UA-101)

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Wed Sep 28 09:08:40 EDT 2005


On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 13:59 +0400, Dmitry Baikov wrote:
> Hello!
> I'm in the process of choosing mobile audio interface for both live sets 
> and studio recording.
> I need minimal possible latency and 8x8 analog I/O.

8 channels across USB? forget it. USB can stretch to about 4 channels
before things start to fall apart. YMMV, but this is what i've seen in
many win/mac audio forums.

> Is it possible in practice? And for what number of channels? Also, is FW 
> much better than USB2 and why?

yes, its much better: vastly higher bandwidth, much faster bus clock.

> As for FW solution, FreeBob project's site states FA-101 works, but I'd 
> like to know about minimal possible latency. And does it have any 
> restrictions on buffers/frequency setup?

not sure.

> As for RME Multiface ($700) + Cardbus ($390) (for notebook) + PCI ($300) 
> (for desktop), it's much more expensive solution, and AFAIK it's hard to 
> find notebook with appropriate PCMCIA controller to get 64-sample 
> (minimal) buffers to work reliable.

i'm not sure that its that hard anymore. kernel 2.6 seemed to have fixes
for most of the cardbus/pci bridge chipsets that removed problems with
low latency. 64 frame/period reliability has a lot more to do with the
rest of the system than the PCMCIA controller, in my experience. for
example, on kernel 2.4, my cardbus controller worked fine for anything
*below* 256 frames/period (but not above); my kernel wasn't well patched
enough to make that work reliably at 64 frames/period.

--p





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