27 Feb
2003
27 Feb
'03
8:45 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 07:03:07 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
you need to understand that this state of affairs is
caused by
misleading advertising and marketing. firewire cards cost $50 and can
Actually, in europe at least firewire cards are < $20. The abundance of DV
camcorders has pushed the price down.
as a result, the "firewire" cards you are
seeing are actually
proprietary uses of an extraordinarily cheap technology. the MOTU
stuff is one example, the RME HDSP series is another. there is no deep
technical reason why these devices could not have been implemented as
external devices that send data to a generic 1394 card, handled by a
generic 1394/audio driver. but this would require an agreed upon
protocol, and would make it clear that the cost of these devices is
too high by a factor of 2-5. consequently, we are currently stuck with
these so-called "firewire" interfaces in which the fact that they use
1394 is about as relevant as the color of the packing they use.
I was under the impression that the HDSP used the firewire physical layer,
but not the signalling technology, but I could be wrong about that, you'd
be the person to know I guess...
The other 1394 devices do at least work with generic cards, even if they
dont use a standard protocol.
- Steve