[LAU] /re: Laptops for firewire based pro-audio on linux

Edward Diehl diehl at umich.edu
Wed Feb 1 14:26:55 UTC 2012


Concerning laptops with firewire I have a Dell 1420 laptop with a Ricoh
firewire controller that runs very well.  The controller is:

03:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev
05)

This runs fine with AVLinux 5.0.2 and a Focusrite Saffire Pro24 firewire
interface.  I've run it down to 2 ms latency recording a stereo track with
no xruns.  Possibly, could do even better but I have not pushed it since
that was adequate for my needs.  

The only issue I've had is that occasionally the Focusrite device is not
detected meaning that /dev/fw1 is not created when I turn the Focusrite
device on.  This problem is fixed either by power cycling the Focusrite or
rebooting.  I'm not sure if this problem is hardware or software, and might
possibly be related to the the Ricoh controller, but there are many other
possibilities.  At any rate, once the Focusrite is detected as /dev/fw1 it
runs well.

Of course, my experience may have limited relevance to what Dell currently
offers.


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