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

[Athanasios Silis]

Hi there,
Thank you for the information. Yes synchronisation is always an issue and
perhaps I framed the question inadequately, but what I am after is not
complete synchronisation but rather to utilise the analog ins and outs of
this additional soundcard too.

So I am not after 0ms latency per se, but rather something in the order
<12msec. This has been possible across soundcards using the alsa driver, so
I assume it is not out of place to aim for it now too. Perhaps this is not
possible across different jack backend which is why I ask for the various
setup possibilities.

The easiest for me would be to use the saffireLE through the alsa driver,
but that only exposes 1 single stereo playback stream. I want all 3. So
what do I have?

Thanks,
Nass


On Sat, 1 May 2021, 23:07 David Kastrup, <dak at gnu.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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