Re: [LAU] usb or firewire (when having a ricoh chipset)

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
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Received on Thu Oct 28 20:15:01 2010