FireWire vrs PCI

[PDP]

Just bought a Focusrite FireWire pro 14, surprizingly the latency is a bit higher than the M-Audio PCI 2496 card I have. It also seems the Focusrite wants a higher buffer setting to run the DAW as well as the PCI card. I'm thinking I may return it until I can afford an RME or lynx PCIe card. Other than the monitoring latency, are there any other things to consider?

 

[TetraFish]

Sounds like you're using the on board FireWire which probably isn't a Texas instrument chipsets. For my fire studio it would just barely function with on board FireWire. Now that I have a pci FireWire card with one of the recommended chipsets I can knock the sample rate down to 64 and get latency of about 5 ms combined in and out.

Check the manufacturers web site for recommended chip sets. Also I had some problems with a pci wireless card that I had to disable.

 

[PDP]

Thanks,
I'm using a Siig PCIe card which is TI, The latency is only like 4ms higher on the firewire which is just about nothin. It just seems there are more pops and clicks when its used at the same setting as the PCI card. I'll try it out more. I try to keep latency under 10ms total. How does yours run?

 

[TetraFish]

Thanks,
I'm using a Siig PCIe card which is TI, The latency is only like 4ms higher on the firewire which is just about nothin. It just seems there are more pops and clicks when its used at the same setting as the PCI card. I'll try it out more. I try to keep latency under 10ms total. How does yours run?

Odd, mine runs fine, no pops clicks drop outs etc...

Do you have the m- audio card disabled? What about other pci cards?

 

[PDP]

No I didnt disable the M-audio card, Thanks Great Idea!!!, I'll try that. Also it is clicking on a track with 5 soft-synths, The M-audio also clicks but on a shorter buffer size. Its not that crucial because the Firewire direct monitors, the PCI card doesnt. Thanks for your help!!!

 

[Chili]

I'm not real savvy when it comes to this kind of stuff, but do you have anything else on the PCI bus that could be interfering? Could you move the card to a higher priority slot? Do you have any background services that you could terminate?

Just ideas.

Edit: Just saw the M-Audio idea.

 

[altitude909]

why is it surprising the latency is higher on FW than PCI?

 

[PDP]

why is it surprising the latency is higher on FW than PCI?

I guess it shouldnt be. Ha, yeah its more direct being in a slot rather than going through a Firewire PCIe card and then to the unit.

 

[dgatwood]

Should be a minimal difference between PCI and FireWire. Most modern computers should be able to easily run FireWire with round-trip latency of 6 msec or so (at 64-sample buffer size) unless you're stacking a lot of tracks and effects. PCI... well, ostensibly 32 samples, but realistically, 64 samples most of the time.

If you're getting pops at 128 samples, you have something really abusing your system. Have you checked for DPC latency? (I'm assuming this is Windows.) Grab DPC latency checker and see what it tells you. more info

You might also check to see what devices are sharing interrupts with the FireWire card. Make sure you're not sharing it with any A. video cards or B. USB controllers. Both those tend to cause unacceptable interrupt latency for anything sharing an interrupt with them.

Also check your PCI latency timers.

 

[PDP]

Thanks thats great info. really appreciate it. I was delighted when I saw my FW card was on IRQ 17 (graphics is on 16) but I havent checked 17 for sharing yet. Really appreciate your help.