[LAU] disappointing experience with firewire

Susanne Schneider susemuse27 at gmx.de
Wed Dec 31 08:49:42 EST 2008


hi,
this is no complaint (!) about anything, just to reflect over my 
yesterday's exerience with a newly purchased Focusrite Saffire Pro10, 
connected via Belkin PCMCIA Firewirecard to my Lenovo R61 - the FW Chip 
in this Laptop is one of those crappy Ricoh parts, I tried this, too, 
but as expected it just didn't work...
So I compiled the ffado Release Candidate, afterwards compiled the 
actual Jack 0.116.1 and finally got things running.
Compared to my Lexicon Omega Studio USB Device the performance of that 
FW assembly (don't want to blame a single device of that chain) just was 
disappointing, already in idlemode without any clients open the 
jackserver showed a workload of roughly 5% (128 frames/3 periods), while 
my Lexicon produces between 0.5 to 1% (128 frames/2 periods).
Opening Ardour and just replaying one of my sessions produced glitches 
where only a strong hiss could be heard. (The session itself caused a 
workload of less than 20%.) - I remember having had those hiss glitches 
in my early days in 2005 with the MAudio Transit USB and Kernel 2.6.11 - 
I never expected them coming back some day... *lol*
I then had a look on my interrupts and had to notice the FW Card sharing 
it's interrupt (no 16) with the Nwidia Graficscard - so I might have 
found the culprit - or not? - I don't know... :-(((
I tried to change the pci settings in the bios - no success.
Now my question to those who also tried firewire audio: was it a success 
story for you from the beginning or did anybody make similar experiences 
and how did you proceed further?
thanks for your attention
Susanne



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