Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 or......?

[UncleAge]

It seems that nobody else has this issue with idle CPU cycles (run task manager to be sure).

Sorry I can't help you out on this. I don't run Win7 on any of my machines.

[0fps]

I had very bad experience using Saffire at a MacPro with tiger and later with leopard. I work at a music technology college so lot's of users were experiencing a variety of very annoying and malfuctioning issues, who were related with its drivers.

After various updates and tech-talks we got rid of it and took a different company's interface. Now we use it only as an adat interface and works well more or less, but again if we try a/d d/a or MIDI or preamps, tones of problems will come up again.

[UnCL0NED]

...

I don't know about the 2626, but I currently own the Focusrite Saffire Pro 40. Before that I had the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra R8, which I sold within 2 weeks... I wanted to upgade my Saffire Pro which didn't have sufficient inputs for me anymore, and thought I get a nice cheap upgrade with the M-Audio soundcard, but it was a complete nightmare on my Macbook Pro. Half of the time it didn't recognize the soundcard when I started Ableton. Also, if you didn't fire it up in the right order, I would hear a loud click, which didn't sound too healthy for my monitors. So I sold it, and bought the Pro 40. Never had a problem with it!

I also use the reverb-, compressor- and eq-vst's that come with it, a lot on my tracks. And as mentioned before, the Mix Control is actually quite handy and easy to use.

For me it will always be Focusrite for audio interfaces from now on.

[purplesnet]

And a hint about asio4all: it's not giving anybody a lower latency, it does not count any of the native drivers buffers. Asio4all just adds a asio layer to the native sound driver, and as such has no information of the latency the real sound card drivers add. You can do a loop-back test to verify this where you can see that the real latency is a lot bigger than reported by asio4all.

[purplesnet]

Oh and you might want to avoid M-Audio profire interfaces, they have RANDOM latency. It's a bug
in their driver code, and there's no word of updated drivers. Except they keep promising to update
the drivers as they have for over half a year.

[leedsquietman]

asio4all can still be better performing than native drivers, I am not alone in thinking that Focusrite's native drivers are not the best, it has been commented on in several reviews I've read, including the Saffire Pro 24 in Sound On Sound, nor am I alone in seeing asio4all improve upon the performance of it's native driver (when I tested it) and other interfaces. It wraps the WDM driver with asio, not asio with asio, so a badly written asio native driver can perform worse than the the wrapped WDM driver in asio4all. It doesn't hurt to try it out anyway. On my Alesis FW interface, not only does asio4all perform better, it runs higher track and plugin counts before choking.

This suggests some vendors don't write very good native ASIO drivers.

M-audio claim that the problem at it's most extreme is no more than 16 samples out, which is next to nothing. I don't own their interfaces so can't comment but if what they say is correct, it's no biggie - most latency reporting is wrong and/or doesn't include any additional buffers or A/D/D/A latency.

Uncloned - why did you sell the FTUR8 ? This has some excellent reviews, so I'm curious to know about your experiences.

[UncleAge]

OP:
Here's a thread on the Reaper forum about a year ago with what I found the drivers to do on my XP system. As always, ymmv...
http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=40118

[redglass]

I had very bad experience using Saffire at a MacPro with tiger and later with leopard. I work at a music technology college so lot's of users were experiencing a variety of very annoying and malfuctioning issues, who were related with its drivers.

After various updates and tech-talks we got rid of it and took a different company's interface. Now we use it only as an adat interface and works well more or less, but again if we try a/d d/a or MIDI or preamps, tones of problems will come up again.

which saffire where the one you used? 2626 or Pro 24/40?

[leedsquietman]

Uncle Age - the link you provided had a lot of the usual uninformed buffoons talking in amongst some good information.

Stuff which is WRONG - Dice II chipsets don't work with Sonar - this is almost always a firewire chipset issue such as using ricoh, 02 etc. and even then they CAN work with a bit of tweaking. Sonar 7.0.3. patched up a problem with Dice II within Sonar, but of course, once something gets spread, it never stops even though it's long been fixed.

Dice II chipsets in Alesis - erm, also TC Konnekt, Focusrite, Presonus etc - the product is actually licensed from TC and is a good chipset, but firewire implementation in non Texas INstruments (or VIA) chipsets especially on PC is getting poorer.

Alesis interfaces don't work with Dell - Well my IO14 works fine with BOTH of my current functional Dell computers, one with TI chipset and one with Ricoh. The thread also shows some people with Dell running both SOnar and an Alesis interface.

People on the Sonar forum recommending MOTU - this is debatable, given that MOTU while not using Dice II, and a great product on Macs, can often have poorer performance on PC with a lot of questions about the efficiency of their PC drivers.

In fact, the TC Konnekt, Focusrite and Alesis interfaces have arguably better pres and converters.

[UncleAge]

Uncle Age - the link you provided had a lot of the usual uninformed buffoons talking in amongst some good information.

True. Check the date of the thread though. And I would not call Rosenberry a buffoon exactly but I do take it all with a grain of salt. IOW, I'm not selling my interface because someone else says I should. I did a bit of research before I bought the Echo unit and then again when I bought the Pr040. I'm happy so far. My advice to the OP is to make an informed decision and things will probably turn out alright.

And if pre's matter that much to anybody they can just save a few dollars and get a dedicated pre for that special mic/situation. I find that my Pro40 works well with the mics that I have. However I did notice a bit of a difference when I used my Oktava with my Earthworks 1022. But that's a whole different thread, so...

[gosinisha]

why bother yourself with the companies that have messy drivers like tc electronic, m-audio, focusrite....
for some mid range there is edirol, echo, higher there is rme. roland releases only tested drivers. they do not have 20 versions of driver. there is one and this one works. that says it all. echo is the same. and they do not make in china. spare yourself the misery going through support cycles. simply look at the web pages of hardware makers how many versions of drivers exist and what do people say on the forum.

[leedsquietman]

Dice II has been around since 2003 and first started appearing in products in 2004.

So there is no excuse for audio interface vendors and DAW manufacturers having issues with it. It actually is a good internal firewire chipset with low jitter and an improvement on much of what came before it and after.

What has changed is that in PC world, no-one cares about firewire or pro audio in general, so now just use cheap, integrated chipsets to save on money. Even Apple with their recent change from TI to LSI/Agere - difference being, Mac is seen as a pro audio niche, and with just one or two chipset variations so it's a lot less work to optimize for their cheap solution.

The main problem is not Dice II, it's cheap firewire solutions which are not designed with pro audio in mind and (often combined with) poor ASIO drivers etc. There are plenty of people running TC Konnekt's, Presonus, Focusrite and Alesis interfaces (even with Dells) just fine, in spite of all of this conjecture.

I don't disagree that RME and Echo are good products, typically with good functional low latency drivers.

[foetus666]

I have a profire 2626 running on xp sp2 amd dual core set up. I find it simple to use and it's never failed me in the 2 years I've had it. Have recorded metal, punk, hip hop etc on it. The mic pre amps are ok. My only grip with it is that the mic gain knobs are not great at fine control once you get past 3 o'clock. Only a minor grip though. I use the instrument ins for bass and guitar through pods amp farm and it sounds good. One other minor grip would be that the headphone amps are quite weak.

[smaucher]

leeds, how about creating a website where you put your firewire-on-pc-is-crap-nowadays statement an just put a link into every DAW hardware thread instead of writing the same stuff again and again?

[leedsquietman]

nice idea !