Have you tried an expresscard firewire adapter?

[mikemc]

It is one of these,

http://microcenter.com/single_product_r ... id=0266702

goes into the expresscard slot and provides 2 Firewire 400 ports. I am just curious if anyone has used one with a firewire audio/midi interface.

[leedsquietman]

Does it have a TI firewire chipset (it doesn't mention it but unless it's TI or VIA forget it).

Is your Expresscard buss by Intel and not integrated with SD Card and other components ?

For example, my Dell laptop has a crappy ricoh chipset (as do most laptops these days) and on top of this, the firewire chipset is integrated with the expresscard and sd card (all controlled from one integrated ricoh chip). So getting an expresscard to firewire adapter, even with a TI chipset won't help as it all still has to pass through the integrated ricoh chipset anyway.

If your Expresscard buss is not integrated, SIIG make a good adapter with a TI firewire chipset.

[#1thelark]

@leedsquietman

Are you sure about that? That makes no sense to me... expresscard does not have anything to do with onboard firewire-buses, and sd-card readers are usually running on usb. If you plug the fw-cable into the expresscard-fw-adapter, it should be connected directly to the expresscardbus (equal to the pciexpress bus on desktop pcs) and no onboard-fw should be involved. But maybe you've got a link to prove me wrong?

[martin808]

I have that exact same adaptor for my toshiba laptop as the onboard firewire port got damaged.

I use it with an Echo audiofire2 and it works fine, although i have occasionally had the soundcard cut out. Not sure if this is the adaptors fault.

[petit nuage]

hello ! i have one by belkin with texas instrument chipset ..very good !! and no problems with sound cards because of texas instrument chipset !!

its for me the first thing i look now ... :the chipset by T.I

[leedsquietman]

http://www.ricoh.com/LSI/product_pcif/pcc/index.html

as you can see most of ricoh's integrated chip solutions integrate fw, sd card, compact flash, pc card (expresscard) on one chip designed to be cheap and in no way performance orientated. Ditto O2, another cheap sh*t producer of integrated chipsets for laptops. Ricoh and O2 represent about 97% of firewire chipsets in modern laptops.

As eomeone who had a TI controller in my old laptop (now expired), I could get quadruple the number of tracks at lower latencies with very few dropouts, if any. On a single core, 7 year old P4 3.2 Ghz laptop w/ 2GB ram. My newer laptop (Dell XPS Core2Duo, 4 Gbram) flies for most things and flies on the internal card with asio4all, but I need the firewire interface for recording guitars and vocals etc. I often have to do ridiculous workarounds such as if I come up with a guitar part late into a track composition, have to render the other tracks to one stereo track, import this into a new project, lay the guitar track down, render it and then reimport it into the old project using the internal card and asio4all where I can mix lots of tracks and fx with no issues.

[3phase]

hello ! i have one by belkin with texas instrument chipset ..very good !! and no problems with sound cards because of texas instrument chipset !!

its for me the first thing i look now ... :the chipset by T.I

thats a good tip... you are at least on the safe side with a more expensiv chip inside..and when sombody reports ocassional dropouts on the product of your choice i would consider this as a warning

[rosti]

http://www.delock.de/produkte/suche/Exp ... anguage=EN

I have that one and it works fine with Edirol FA-66. I use it mainly because i want all the cables at the same side of my MBP.

edit: no bus power on the DeLock though

[stjohn]

yea im on a Ricoh chipset too, and from what i have read before, my 4 pin FW is on the same board as the expresscard slot.
although I still might get one because of the issues i have with the 4 pin connection. It can disconnect really easily.

[Simmo]

I use a SIIG expresscard firewire adaptor for my Dell XPS M1330 connected to my RME Fireface 400 which pretty much works well apart from the odd pop and crack. I bought it and moved away from the onboard firewire port because of major audio breakup / asio crashing issues I had - this solved most of the problems.

I spent ages researching why the onboard performance was rubbish including talking to contacts in Dell and over support cases with RME. Turns out in my scenario, the RME is particularly subject problems with inconsistent bandwidth over firewire channels. My particular laptop model apparently suffers from throughput issues within the PCI Express channels on the chipset which affects the built in adaptor but not so much expresscards. In addition I had to do strange things like disable the 802.11a bands of the wifi card and enable command queuing on the SATA drive!

Basically I found firewire to be a pain in the arse for my situation and I mainly use the build in soundcard with ASIO4ALL now for mobile production and a desktop with a PCI Express internal sound card for studio production... but thats just my scenario


Cheers, Simmo