[LAU] usb or firewire (when having a ricoh chipset)

[Lorenzo Sutton]

Hi,

Hope this helps...

rosea.grammostola wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Having a ricoh firewire chipset here on a thinkpad t61. Not the best 
> one afaik.. Should I go for a usb (edirol for example) or firewire 
> interface?
I had an JMicron (?) chipset on the on-board firewire plug on my laptop 
which was also on the same IRQ as basically everything (ethernet, 
graphics card, 2 usb ports etc.) I found no way to even get it to work 
with the 2nd hand FA 101 I bought.

I then got a (cheap) firewire expresscard. The good thing was that the 
express card slot has its own IRQ. The bad thing was that I discovered 
the chipset was VIA (they don't tell on the packings) which seems to be 
one of the worst around for audio and which would give me a "zombified" 
sound card after a few minutes even with rt kernel and all the possible 
tweaks explained in all the possible linux firewire/pro-audio tutorials 
on the net.

Finally I got a firewire expresscard with Texas Instruments chipset 
(again it took quite some research because it's not well advised on the 
specs and in the stores), here in italy it's branded Digitus (but 
careful because they also have a model with the VIA chipset). It now 
seems to work well. No zombies... A few xruns though (but this was 
playing heavy with Pd).

So it looks like the chipset is important... I have seen various 
recommended firewire cards (and thus chipsets) on the sound card 
manufacturers' pages so I think this is not a linux-related issue.

Lorenzo
>
> \r
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