25 Apr
2005
25 Apr
'05
6:39 a.m.
Wolfgang Woehl wrote:
You didn't ask that but I can't resist:
Compared to PCI performance
every firewire i/o box looks meagre. No DMA. Interleaved transmission,
so bandwidth trouble hits all channels right away. Firewire was not
made with multichannel audio in mind and it shows.
The biggest problem is that it's about impossible to properly
synchronize to the device's sample clock because all transmissions are
synchronized to the firewire bus clock.
RME's Fireface manual reads like a confession.
Problems all over the
place. They built a thing called "Safety buffer" into it. Gives you a
minimum round-trip latency of 48 frames in + 48 frames out + 64 frames
safety on the way out (3.6 ms/44.1khz). Not bad but not good either me
says.
Why everybody wants firewire i/o just the same? I don't know.
There is a need for external (notebook based) audio interfaces, and
USB isn't considered 'professional' (although from the audio POV, USB
and Firewire have the same problems).
Clemens