[LAU] Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 - reliable?

[Ben Bell]

Well here's the promised follow-up mail. So far, the bottom line is that
it's not as reliable as my dual Delta 1010 setup. There's a lot to like
about the Focusrite but things are not entirely working properly and I haven't
got to the bottom of why.

The biggest problem I have is that the ADAT channels go through periodswhere
they exhibit digital noise, in that I get frequent clicks across all channels
simultaneously. Driver, focusrite, cable or ADAT outboard? Not sure, and I'm
still going through the slow process of elimination. The funny thing is that
after an initial problem period it seemed stable for about a week when I left
it all powered up and monitoring. I put it down to a bad cable I'd just
replaced but it's just started doing it again.

Secondly, the ffado drivers may or may not be solid under the hood when
they're up and running (assuming the above bug isn't their fault) but on the
version I'm on (2.2.1) there's a lot of shakiness around the edges. ffado-mixer
is very slow to use, taking a second or so to process each command sent to the
ffado-dbus-server. Various things like stopping jack also cause a whole bunch
of processes just to lock up and I have to go around manually killing manually
killing ffado-dbus-server, ffado-mixer, jackd and qjackctl. If I switch the
Focusrite off then, again, I have clean up work to do before things are usable
again.

So the field report so far is that it's a partial success in that I've 
managed to record things with it on all channels, and the ffado-mixer
appears to be able to control everything it needs to but at other times
it's letting me down and there are a fair few issues I'm hitting that will
need to be resolved before I can trust it to real work.

bjb



On Sun, Mar 01, 2015 at 07:22:33PM +0000, Ben Bell wrote:
> Well I read the first few responses and took the plunge. I've got things
> to get recorded and no plan B so I'm going to cross my fingers and go for
> it.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's replied with information, I'll let you all know
> how it goes!
>