3pin to 6pin firewire cable laptop focusrite pro 24

[nickeym1]

hi guys i recently got a new laptop dell xps16 i bought this to bring to my buddies house for recording using a focusrite pro 24 my problem is everything works till i record something which sounds really choppy and unrecognisable. Can anyone tell me whats wrong is it somethin to do with the 6pin to 3pin cable and onboard firewire im using or is this something i can fix by changing some setting in the recording software or laptop i could change to fix.

I know i could get an express firewire which would have 6pin connection but i have waited almost 6 weeks for the laptop and got the wrong firewire card from ebay so i just want a fix if its available any info on this would be really appreciated guys cheers

 

[nickeym1]

Bumppppppppppppp

 

[Cluster]

I guess you are talking about a 6 to 4 Firewire cable! Your problem actually cannot be related to the cable if it is ok, as the additional 2 wires only are there for power supply. You are sending and receiving over 4 wires only. Most likely it is a laptop setup/OS/Software/Driver problem!

 

[dgatwood]

I'm going to be uncharacteristically blunt.... Dell uses a cheap hack of a FireWire chip (Ricoh R5C832) in many of their laptops. The chip is basically "good enough" to sometimes work for FireWire AVC (camcorder capture) and hard drives, but misbehaves massively when asked to do anything complicated. Basically, it's so bad that calling it crap is an insult to crap.

The DICE II chipset used in that particular audio interface can be quite finicky and is basically completely incompatible with the Ricoh FireWire host controller. More to the point, it barely works with anything other than a TI chipset and maybe VIA.

Assuming you do have the Ricoh FireWire chipset, then you have two devices that are known to have major compatibility problems and you're trying to use them together. It is probably never going to work correctly. Your choices are basically to either replace the Focusrite with something that's more reliable or to get a FireWire card that actually works instead of just being a bullet point in a feature list... and odds are, no matter what interface you use, you'll still need a better FireWire card....