On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 13:59 +0400, Dmitry Baikov wrote:
  Hello!
 I'm in the process of choosing mobile audio interface for both live sets
 and studio recording.
 I need minimal possible latency and 8x8 analog I/O. 
8 channels across USB? forget it. USB can stretch to about 4 channels
before things start to fall apart. YMMV, but this is what i've seen in
many win/mac audio forums.
  Is it possible in practice? And for what number of
channels? Also, is FW
 much better than USB2 and why? 
yes, its much better: vastly higher bandwidth, much faster bus clock.
  As for FW solution, FreeBob project's site states
FA-101 works, but I'd
 like to know about minimal possible latency. And does it have any
 restrictions on buffers/frequency setup? 
not sure.
  As for RME Multiface ($700) + Cardbus ($390) (for
notebook) + PCI ($300)
 (for desktop), it's much more expensive solution, and AFAIK it's hard to
 find notebook with appropriate PCMCIA controller to get 64-sample
 (minimal) buffers to work reliable. 
i'm not sure that its that hard anymore. kernel 2.6 seemed to have fixes
for most of the cardbus/pci bridge chipsets that removed problems with
low latency. 64 frame/period reliability has a lot more to do with the
rest of the system than the PCMCIA controller, in my experience. for
example, on kernel 2.4, my cardbus controller worked fine for anything
*below* 256 frames/period (but not above); my kernel wasn't well patched
enough to make that work reliably at 64 frames/period.
--p