[LAU] consolidating a firewire sound card with my other existing pci (alsa) soundcards

[David Kastrup]

Athanasios Silis <athanasios.silis at gmail.com> writes:

> Finally, is there a chance to coordinate 2 jack sessions (each with
> one of alsa, firewire backends) with 0 latency between them ? In this
> setup does anyone have experience with SaffireLE and how to control
> the mixer?

How is 0-latency supposed to work with unsynchronised clocks?

If you want to consolidate multiple soundcards without adding
significant latency for resampling filtering, they must be running on
the same clock (which means that it's mainly comparatively expensive
soundcards that can be consolidated).  Even then you'll not be able to
split a stereo channel across two non-identical cards without
introducing problems from the differing phase response of their
oversampling and filtering circuitry.

Synchronisation can happen in some cases via Firewire (for example, if
you daisychain multiple Alesis i|O 26 devices) but more usually with a
separate word clock sync cable.

For juggling numerous sources, there can be a point in getting a mixer
with digital multi-channel in- and output.

That means you don't need to consolidate multiple soundcards but rather
get to work with some flexible multichannel device.  That tends to be
quite more robust.

-- 
David Kastrup