Firewire

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Firewire is not a bottle neck at all for audio. When you consider that
audio streams are measured in Kbps and even first generation firewire runs
at 400 Mbps, lagging is not an issue. Your best case latency, depending on
your driver model (MME/ASIO/WDM/GSIF) should be down to 1 to 3 ms. I don't
know if you are going PC or Mac, but if it's PC, just make sure that the
Firewire implimentation has the FW supported directly off the chipset and
not a 3rd party solution hanging internally off the PCI bus. Any high speed
interface, whether it be FW, USB2, SATA, Gbit Ethernet, etc requires more
bandwidth than traditional PCI can offer. As a result the PCI bus gets
saturated, which is *very* bad for audio. The number of host based
real-time effects your system can run (or host based soft-synths for that
matter) will be directly proportional to the speed of your processor. The
speed of the bus to your audio card really has no influence on this.

Bill.



"donaldjcecil" <djcecil@cox.net> wrote in message
news:Qk4ve.840$ro.596@fed1read02...
> What sort of latency can I expect from a Firewire audio interface? I will
> be working with midi. Also will audio processing be lagged to the speed of
> Firewire? I guess what Im saying is would buying anything faster than a
> 3Ghz processor really make a difference?

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

In article <p5Tve.10743$U4.1380926@news.xtra.co.nz> bill.ruys@nospam.siliconaudio.co.nz writes:

> Firewire is not a bottle neck at all for audio. When you consider that
> audio streams are measured in Kbps and even first generation firewire runs
> at 400 Mbps, lagging is not an issue.

The pipeline may not be a bottleneck, but drivers are what drive the
througput. Some are better than others.

There are also unexpected quirks, particularly when adding a Firewire
audio interface to a system that's been around for a while. Few people
have a completely troublefree plug-and-play-well experience.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers (mrivers@d-and-d.com)
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:09:18 -0400, Mike Rocha
<therealroach@rogers.com> wrote:

>DAWs
>generally run MUCH better with hyperthreading off.

An interesting statement. I agree that HT seems incompatible with
some programs. But given a system with no incompatibilities, you say
that turning off HT gives better performance?