TetraFish
Well-known member
I've seen a number of threads where people complain about drop outs with various interfaces, not just Presonus, and I thought I'd post about my most recent victory in hopes of solving someone elses problems.
I built a custom PC with recording in mind, fast cpu, fast drives, tons of RAM. I hooked up my Firestudio and had serious problems with my onboard Firewire. I knew ahead of time the issues you can run into but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway and it failed. So I then ordered the only card I could find in Canada that had one of the recomended chip sets. The card arrives and the number on the chipset was off by one number. I thought I'd give it a try and it worked much better but I still had to run in "safe mode 1" with 256 sample rate. My latency was about 22ms which is more than enough to hear, luckily the firestudio has direct monitoring so it was workable.
Shit like this bugs me to no end and I've had this nag in my head for months. Why should I have to run my gear in safe mode with less than stellar latency. So today I call a local repair shop and ask if they can track down a card with a specific TI chipset recommended by Presonus. The guy phones me back in about half an hour and has a used one in his surplus parts for $5. SCORE! So I pick it up and install it. Exact same shit as the other card. If I run in normal mode with 128 sample rate I get drop outs every so often. So I phone Presonus, the guy suggest a few things and bingo, its my PCI wireless card. I disable the wireless card and now I can run in normal mode with a 64 bit sample rate and I'm getting about 5.5ms round trip latency.
So the moral of the story, If your using firewire and your having issues, yank or disable those other PCI cards, start with any wireless cards first.
I built a custom PC with recording in mind, fast cpu, fast drives, tons of RAM. I hooked up my Firestudio and had serious problems with my onboard Firewire. I knew ahead of time the issues you can run into but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway and it failed. So I then ordered the only card I could find in Canada that had one of the recomended chip sets. The card arrives and the number on the chipset was off by one number. I thought I'd give it a try and it worked much better but I still had to run in "safe mode 1" with 256 sample rate. My latency was about 22ms which is more than enough to hear, luckily the firestudio has direct monitoring so it was workable.
Shit like this bugs me to no end and I've had this nag in my head for months. Why should I have to run my gear in safe mode with less than stellar latency. So today I call a local repair shop and ask if they can track down a card with a specific TI chipset recommended by Presonus. The guy phones me back in about half an hour and has a used one in his surplus parts for $5. SCORE! So I pick it up and install it. Exact same shit as the other card. If I run in normal mode with 128 sample rate I get drop outs every so often. So I phone Presonus, the guy suggest a few things and bingo, its my PCI wireless card. I disable the wireless card and now I can run in normal mode with a 64 bit sample rate and I'm getting about 5.5ms round trip latency.
So the moral of the story, If your using firewire and your having issues, yank or disable those other PCI cards, start with any wireless cards first.
