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

Jeremy Jongepier jeremy at autostatic.com
Thu Oct 28 14:51:46 UTC 2010


On 10/28/2010 03:43 PM, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
> Jeremy Jongepier wrote:
>> On 10/28/2010 03:21 PM, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>
>> Hello Lorenzo,
>>
>> I've got a notebook with a JMicron FireWire controller too that shares
>> its IRQ with about 4 or 5 other devices. My FireWire card works just
>> fine with that controller.
> Interesting... what sound card is it? What apps are you using it with?

Focusrite Saffire Pro 10. With all kinds of apps, multitrackers,
softsynths, sequencers.

>>> 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.
>>>
>> VIA should work, Focusrite even recommends using certain VIA chipsets.
> True... I've read (and heard) different opinions about it.
>>> 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.
>>>
>> Chipset is important, but a properly configured system is even more
>> important imho.
> Well that's what I though/hoped.. but the fact that with same system
> configuration and different chipsets one gets different results must
> mean something I guess.
> 

It means that that specific same configuration doesn't work with all
chipsets. Every system needs to be set up differently.

Best,

Jeremy


More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list