On 10/28/2010 03:21 PM, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
Hi,
Hope this helps...
rosea.grammostola wrote:
Hi,
Having a ricoh firewire chipset here on a thinkpad t61. Not the best
one afaik.. Should I go for a usb (edirol for example) or firewire
interface?
I had an JMicron (?) chipset on the on-board firewire plug on my
laptop
which was also on the same IRQ as basically everything (ethernet,
graphics card, 2 usb ports etc.) I found no way to even get it to work
with the 2nd hand FA 101 I bought.
Hello Lorenzo,
I've got a notebook with a JMicron FireWire controller too that shares
its IRQ with about 4 or 5 other devices. My FireWire card works just
fine with that controller.
I then got a (cheap) firewire expresscard. The good
thing was that the
express card slot has its own IRQ. The bad thing was that I discovered
the chipset was VIA (they don't tell on the packings) which seems to be
one of the worst around for audio and which would give me a "zombified"
sound card after a few minutes even with rt kernel and all the possible
tweaks explained in all the possible linux firewire/pro-audio tutorials
on the net.
VIA should work, Focusrite even recommends using certain VIA chipsets.
Finally I got a firewire expresscard with Texas
Instruments chipset
(again it took quite some research because it's not well advised on the
specs and in the stores), here in italy it's branded Digitus (but
careful because they also have a model with the VIA chipset). It now
seems to work well. No zombies... A few xruns though (but this was
playing heavy with Pd).
So it looks like the chipset is important... I have seen various
recommended firewire cards (and thus chipsets) on the sound card
manufacturers' pages so I think this is not a linux-related issue.
Chipset is important, but a properly configured system is even more
important imho.
Best,
Jeremy