[LAU] RME HDSP 9632 - playing @ 192kHz sample rate ?

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 6:51 AM, Florian Faber <faber at faberman.de> wrote:
> Mark,
>
>> Maybe I'm missing the point here but doesn't the '96' in 9632 imply
>> the card only supports up to 96KHz?
>
> No. It's just a name. You can look it up here:
> http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_hdsp_9632.php
>
>> I've never tried running my HDSP faster than 96K.
>
> Depending on the model you have, it's very likely it cannot go faster
> anyway.
>
>
> Flo

Florian,
   Thanks for the info.

   A little history many people may not know but the original
implementations - and possibly still the only implementations - of the
Linux versions of hdspmixer and hdspconf were developed by Thomas
Charbonnel while he lived in France but debugged using my HDSP 9652
here in California. This was all done I guess 5-6 years ago. thomas
didn't have a card so I set up an account on my system and let Thomas
ssh in. He wrote and compiled his code, I loaded the drivers and did
audio and visual debugging, gave him feedback, etc. When we got things
working he released the applications into the mainstream where they
have remained since. At the time that we did this work - I'm guessing
sometime in 2003 - there was no support in the card for anything above
96KHz and the version of hdspconf on my Gentoo machine still only
allows you to set a max of 96K.

   It does appear from the link you provided that RME has adopted the
sliding spec and the newer cards support 192KHz. I'm pretty sure as
you say that mine doesn't. So it seems that at the time I purchased
mine the name did imply a maximum of 96K but today it does not
anymore. Whether the Alsa driver for the card will support 192K I
don't know. I suspect it doesn't unless there have been recent updates
by someone other than Thomas who doesn't seem to participate in Linux
audio anymore, much to my disappointment. the development of hdspmixer
and hdspconf are really fond memories I have of the Open Source
community in general and Thomas specifically.

   Probably instead of telling HDSP9652 owners that 192K is or is not
supported someone should put some info up somewhere at the
alsa-project site that explains how you'd know. It's most likely not
true for most/many of us here I suspect, but that's just a guess.

   BTW - My last siting of Thomas was in Berlin a few years ago. If
he's there you should meet up and have a beer if you haven't already.

Cheers,
Mark