firewire

[carvin]

I am planning on making the change to firewire but I am not exactly sure where to start. I do not have a firewire port so needless to say I do not have an interface. I am going to be building a new P4 and I want to make sure that I am getting what I need. I am looking at about $1500 for just the computer. I am planning about another $1500 for interface. It would be great if someone could give some tips or get me started in the right direction. Thank you for your help.

[pouxhawk]

May I ask why you feel that firewire is the way for you to go?
I switched from a PCI card interface to a firewire one and I'm not sure it was the right decision for me. I'm making it work, but sometimes I wish I had left the firewire buss for hard drive use only.
As an aside, I have damaged one firewire connection already. PCI connectors are a million times more durable.
If you go firewire, you might want permanently install a hub in the back of your rack, and use it for everyday reconnection, and don't mess with the connector on your interface.

poux

[carvin]

I am actually just looking at options. It seems as if there a lot of firewire users and I am not real familiar with it. I currently use a PCI. I have two Gadget Labs Wave 8/24's that are very good sound cards but they do not make drivers for XP so I am looking at possibly upgrading. I found an aftermarket driver but I am finding it to be somewhat unstable. I am running another test with it this week. If you have any suggestions for a new PCI interface that would be great.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by carvin

I am actually just looking at options. It seems as if there a lot of firewire users and I am not real familiar with it. I currently use a PCI. I have two Gadget Labs Wave 8/24's that are very good sound cards but they do not make drivers for XP so I am looking at possibly upgrading. I found an aftermarket driver but I am finding it to be somewhat unstable. I am running another test with it this week. If you have any suggestions for a new PCI interface that would be great.

There really aren't any new PCI interfaces. You can get a newly manufactured old design, but I don't think anybody has put out a new PCI design in several years now. That's because it's a deprecated standard; it is being slowly phased out over the next handful of years, to be replaced by PCI Express (PCIe), which isn't compatible with existing PCI cards.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by pouxhawk

As an aside, I have damaged one firewire connection already. PCI connectors are a million times more durable.
If you go firewire, you might want permanently install a hub in the back of your rack, and use it for everyday reconnection, and don't mess with the connector on your interface.

If you broke a FireWire connection, unless you tripped over a cable or something, odds are, the connector wasn't installed correctly. They are very durable if the equipment designer mounts them properly....

[pouxhawk]

You guessed it exactly... The FW cable got jerked one time and the metal seam separated. I'll need to either send the unit back to MOTU, or replace the connector myself. As tightly as the pack these things, I'm sure that'll be a pain in the .........

DinoG

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by pouxhawk

You guessed it exactly... The FW cable got jerked one time and the metal seam separated. I'll need to either send the unit back to MOTU, or replace the connector myself. As tightly as the pack these things, I'm sure that'll be a pain in the .........

Ouch.

Assuming the pins didn't pop loose from the board, you can probably just bend the shield back together. If the ground or the data pins came loose in the process... that's a little harder, but not too bad if the one in the old iPods is any indication. Nice, wide contact pins... but you'll need a relatively steady hand anyway.

[aaroncomp]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

If you broke a FireWire connection, unless you tripped over a cable or something, odds are, the connector wasn't installed correctly. They are very durable if the equipment designer mounts them properly....

My advice on this issue is to always look carefully that you're lining the male firewire piece (the cable) correctly into the female (the port). Twice (on less important gear than my recording gear), I've blindly reached and "felt" for the cable to insert, to learn I was pressing a little too hard while it was upside-down. They never worked again.

[jakestevens]

Hi,

The actual firewire interface for a computer doesn't cost much (usually under $100). Once your firewire card is installed, look for a great firewire audio interface to connect to it. M-Audio makes some great firewire sound card/audio interfaces you can use like the firewire 410 and 1814. You can find M-Audio firewire interfaces bundled with Pro Tools for around $600-$1200. So once you've got your computer running, it's just plug and play.

Good luck!

Jake

[minofifa]

i just bought a MOTU 828 mkII from ebay for $500. I'm excited about it. it is firewire with a large variety of i/o, good converters, and nice dsp mixing software.

[pouxhawk]

I have thoroughly enjoyed using a 828MKII in spite of its few faults. Those MOTU folks have certainly packed a bunch of stuff into one rack space. For the money, it does everything well, if not great. I added an additional eight inputs using the ADAT connectors. I rarely record more than three or four tracks at a time, but it allows me to move from one instrument to another without physically re-patching. I just do it in the audio software.
DinoG

[pouxhawk]

Dgatwood
I tried gently coaxing the firewire connector back together. I ended up buggering the thing up worse. MOTU told me they will swap it for another unit for fifty dollars. I gotta get OMA and do that soon. In the mean time, Im going to try using two foot extensions, secured to the inside of the rack, for my most used connectors. This happened all too easily. Combine poor cable etiquette and lousy rack management with a clumsy goomba tripping over a cable and yer outta business. This would of been disastrous if I was depending on this stuff to pay the bills.
DinoG

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by pouxhawk

Dgatwood
I tried gently coaxing the firewire connector back together. I ended up buggering the thing up worse. MOTU told me they will swap it for another unit for fifty dollars. I gotta get OMA and do that soon. In the mean time, Im going to try using two foot extensions, secured to the inside of the rack, for my most used connectors. This happened all too easily. Combine poor cable etiquette and lousy rack management with a clumsy goomba tripping over a cable and yer outta business. This would of been disastrous if I was depending on this stuff to pay the bills.
DinoG

Flip side is that this is true for just about any cable, short of surface-contact designs with a magnetic or hard rubber lock tabs like the new MacBook Pro power cords or the power cord on my Sony Ericsson phone. The problem, of course, is that surface contacts don't work well if it is crucial that the signal never be interrupted accidentally; choosing the magic point between breaking away to avoid damage and falling away when you bump it is pretty tricky.

My favorite of all time was when I ripped an 1/8" stereo to 1/4" stereo adapter in half by tripping on a headphone cord. Didn't hurt the Mackie board or the headphone extension cable, but the adapter was in about three pieces.

You know, there's something to be said about inline connectors on cables. A good way to avoid breakage (for any cable) is to buy/make about a 6 inch cable with a male plug and a female jack hooked together. Do this and you will almost certainly never break a jack again, as the inline connector will always be lined up along the direction of force, and thus will always give more readily than the jack in the device (which may be at a substantial angle relative to the direction of cable travel).

[pouxhawk]

In the near future, I can see the possibility of having to go mobile with this gear. Continuous setting up and breaking down can beat the you know what out of cables and connectors. I have already taken steps to make things neater and more organized in the back of the racks. This in itself should make a big difference. I think I need to do some homework to see if there's a feasible way to make FW cables. Someone must sell raw connectors and the proper crimping tool.

Relating back to Carvins initial point of this thread, if he wants to go Firewire, he should keep in mind that the FW connectors "may" be more fragile than the screwed in PCI connectors, and definitely harder to repair than the quarter inch or XLRs most of us are used to using. As I mentioned, this happened all too easily. You can have all the spare cables in the world, but if the connector on the equipment gets buggered, you're in big trouble. I wouldn't be comfortable depending on this type of connector in a professional mobile environment, without some sort of added protection for the circuit board mounted connectors.

DinoG