New Echo Audiofire Drivers!

Mango · Post by **Mango** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 5:08 pm

anyone tried the new drivers for audiofire 4?
would like to know if theres everything ok now
because id like to get one for my macbook c2d.

or should i go for the motu ultralite?

i dont know ???

4.3
· Inputs and outputs should now be labeled correctly in applications such as Audio MIDI Setup and Digital Performer
· The AudioFire 2 & 4 firmware has been rewritten; FireWire timestamps are now more accurate.
· The console now has activity lights on each tab.

http://www.echoaudio.com/Downloads/Drivers.php

interceptor · Post by **interceptor** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 7:32 am

I´d like to know this too.

Seems theres been mixed experiences with this soundcard in the past.

leedsquietman · Post by **leedsquietman** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:11 am

I don't know but I have owned an Echo Gina and an Echo Indigo IO card in the past and enjoyed them and their performance loads. Great cards. Still, they are only as good as their drivers - you can usually roll back drivers if they go tits up, so maybe try it and see ? The thing I liked about Echo is that even though they eventually discontinued the Indigo IO, they continued to write drivers for it, so it has vista support and there were at least 12 revisions to the IO drivers, with at least 9 of them giving small performance/latency improvements.

And I just got an alesis IO14 and the recently revised drivers corrected several bugs, give one or two extra options in the control panel and (best of all) improved latency. The combined latency I had on 256 samples on the IO was 13 ms, when I saw the combined latency on the IO14 was 19.5ms on 256 samples, I thought SHIT. BUt the revised drivers are a more workable 15.4ms which is pretty good for firewire. The IO was a PCMCIA cardbus card which has less latency than firewire or USB.

All cards have mixed reviews, (see hardware comment below) the only manufacturer who seems to have almost universal praise is RME and rightly so, but that satisfaction does come at a premium too high for some (800-2000 dollar range).

Hardware plays a big part - sometimes, for whatever reason, an audio card just does not sit well with certain chipsets or motherboards. This is especially true for firewire interfaces on PC.

interceptor · Post by **interceptor** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:46 am

Well, Alesis seems to do something right. Right now im using the Photon X25 wich is USB 1.1 and I have a buffer size of 109 samples with 8.73 ms latency. I can run 8 tracks with Hi Q reverb, compressor and grain delay on each channel, reaching 50%cpu. I think thats pretty good for a USB1.1 interface.

Too bad its very noisy, and doesnt respond to midi input since Leopard.

Still i´d like to hear about the experiences with the new Audiofire driver.

Karimbou · Post by **Karimbou** » Sat Jan 05, 2008 1:34 pm

I am using Audiofire4 (newest Drivers) with my old Mac-Powerbook and Live5 and am very happy with this constellation...

pl · Post by pl » Sat Jan 05, 2008 3:35 pm

I'm using an audiofire4 with my laptop. sadly its got vista installed (not my choice) and the audiofire4 tends to disable itself after 30min or less. very annoying. anybody else having this problem?

pl · Post by pl » Wed Jan 09, 2008 12:45 am

pl wrote:I'm using an audiofire4 with my laptop. sadly its got vista installed (not my choice) and the audiofire4 tends to disable itself after 30min or less. very annoying. anybody else having this problem?

anyone?

interceptor · Post by **interceptor** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 6:16 am

This card looks like such a sweet deal price/quality wise.

But maybe not driver wise?

roby · Post by **roby** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:08 am

I used to use a Gina24 and I'm currently using a Layla24 with laptop interface, i can just say that both of these products are amazing. Great machines with awesome sound quality.

I do not see myself replacing my Layla24 any time soon unless my laptop dies and I get a replacement laptop that does not support PCMCIA or something, in which case I would blindly buy an Audiofire.

dysanfel · Post by **dysanfel** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 3:46 pm

Get a Duet if you can get by with 2 channels. The converters sound incredible.

pl · Post by pl » Fri Jan 18, 2008 8:29 pm

4.6 Drivers now available.

Hopefully they will sort out my problem

Casual Beats · Post by **Casual Beats** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 3:53 am

roby wrote:I do not see myself replacing my Layla24 any time soon unless my laptop dies and I get a replacement laptop that does not support PCMCIA or something, in which case I would blindly buy an Audiofire.

agreed. I've had a layla24 for about 8 years now and this thing still runs flawlessly

signal · Post by **signal** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:43 am

I've had an Echo sound card in all of my computers for the past ten years. Never had a problem with driver installation, updates or day-to-day performance. This applies to both Layla and Indigo on cardbus and Gina on PCI. As someone mentioned upthread, Echo continues to support discontinued products through driver updates long after they are out of production. Latency, noise floor, and converter quality are all great. I expect to try out one of their Firewire products down the road when I decide to upgrade.

pl · Post by pl » Mon Jan 21, 2008 2:09 am

sadly it didn't solve my problem

not blaming echo tbh because my mia worked perfectly, can see this being more a vista problem. damn microshaft.

jamesm1985 · Post by **jamesm1985** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 7:35 am

the 4.6 drivers are seriously flawed (on vista at least)!

they have tried to implement some system to deprioritise vista window rendering, but in doing so have caused MAJOR lag spikes (in both love 6 and 7) when ever you try and scroll (or try and open any window actually). rolling back to 4.3 solves the problem.

changing buffer settings makes no difference, when ever you scroll down with keyboard buttons for instance, the cpu meter spikes in ableton up to 20-40% and audio stuttering and clicking occurs. i've got a dual core cpu with 2gig of ram btw.

i would report this to echo support, but their site has been down for the past two days (except for the main page).

anyone else notcied this.