[LAU] Firewire at last

Almost a week ago, I finally got around to ordering Firewire, in the form of the Behringer FCA202. And I have to admit that I am quite shocked with how well this unit, the least expensive new Firewire interface of which I am aware, is working. I had not before heard of any expression "Once you try Firewire, you don't go back," but certainly I won't be going back by choice. It was a simple lock-and-load, no adjustments other than telling the modules to load at boot and setting the Jack driver to firewire, and the result was astonishing, beautiful quality sound, zero hiccups, no problems at all, all load levels. And I don't have to worry about its USB A port! Yahoo!!!!! And it is interesting, it is by way of this FCA202 that I learned that although the Zitas were working, there was additional latency occurring in the jack-to-zita offload. It was audible but barely, which presumably means something like 4-6ms. My testbed for that is playing a MIDI keyboard in piano mode while simultaneously sending the MIDI data to drive the synth; I play live like that fairly often, and although the tiniest difference in attack is acceptable, the Zita method was giving me a bit more, which I brought to almost-AOK by giving the Zita process 80-level priority in schedtool, but which the FCA202 knocked out of the park. I played through the FCA202 this morning, and it was astonishing, the detail of the tone quality, in both highs and lows. And I haven't even tried 96 kHz yet :-) I do not know frankly know whether my Yoshimis and Fluidsynths will play ball well with 96 kHz, I do not know whether it is a very tested configuration. -- Jonathan E. Brickman Ponderworthy Music | jeb@ponderworthy.com<mailto:jeb@ponderworthy.com> | (785)233-9977 | http://ponderworthy.com