Least reliable firewire interface?

[junior]

Funny thing is, M-audio's USB interfaces have been pretty solid IME... Go figure

[mds]

I've owned a few firewire interfaces over the years...the Firepod was junk for me on a PC. Lots of dropouts, clicks, pops, whatever. Got rid of it. Briefly tried a Firebox, and it did all the same things. Switched to a MOTU Traveler and it was perfect every day I owned it on both PC and Mac(sold it last week, but not because it wasn't good)...don't buy into the MOTU is for Macs thing...it may have been true 5 or more years ago, but their stuff works great on PCs. DIGI002 has worked great for me, though PT in general can be a bit flaky. The box itself is fine, even when running other software (Samplitude, Vegas, DP, Logic, etc.).

I don't have personal experience with M-Audio, but a friend of mine was just telling me about the the blues screens he get with his 1814...may have been resolved, but I'd research it pretty carefully if you're considering one...

Good luck,

Mike

[headwerkn]

My Focusrite Saffire was absolute rubbish. Bad build quality. Terrible software. Virtually useless... so useless in fact it turned me off computer DAWs and blondes in general. I now own a Roland VS2400 and date a redhead.

Had generally bad experiences with a Phonic Helix FW-enabled mixer. Used to be pretty good but over the past year it just won't hold a connection on a Mac using CoreAudio. Other guys in the band have more luck using some 3rd party plugin on a PC.

Had very good experiences with my Mackie Onyx Satellite. Only 2 inputs but as a general 5.1 capable sound card/portable audio interface it rocks. Stability on Mac has been rock solid though the FW issues with 10.4.9 took a little while to sort out. On Leopard though - no probs. Plug and play through CoreAudio. Very cheap too these days.

[LewisWu]

the only m-audio firewire device i've had experience with is the audiophile.. and while i don't have anything good to say about it, i don't have anything bad to say about it either. however their pci devices have proven to be exceptionally stable. I currently have a firepod, and have only experienced problems when i switched cpu to the wrong range. otherwise, its been pretty damn stable for me. I use the firepod with a prescott based computer on a TI chipset firewire card.

[brett304]

I know the thread is supposed to be about firewire interfaces, but I just wanted to mention that I got a M-audio omni studio (delta 66 with Omni I\O Breakout Box... I got it probably 4 years ago and have never had a single issue with it... Its been fantastic... Looking to go firewire eventually just so that I can eventually be more mobile... Thanks and hope nobody minds the quick hijack...

[bulls hit]

Yeah I know, I had a delta 44 and it was a great little interface.

I know it's hardly a scientific survey, but looking at those results M-Audio certainly seem to amongst the most popular fw interfaces, and yet on the face of it you'd be mad to touch one with a barge pole

[VegetativeState]

I have experience with the saffire (full version) Mackie, and RME firewire interfaces and would say that the RME is the most reliable and the saffire the least reliable with the mackie being quite good, it just lacked a couple features that I needed. All of them sounded pretty good, but ultimately I am using the fireface 800 and not the other two. I'll cut you a great deal on a very slightly used Saffire if you want it though :)

BTW, all my experience is with PC/Sonar.

[truthnlife13]

MOTU 828 mkII and 24 IO(PCI) - 1 flawless
Presonus firepod - 2 - flaky but made it work
M audio Project mix IO - 3 terrible lasted one day before I got rid of it
Mackie Onyx 1640 - 1 flawless and sounds best of all I have owned
Aardvark Q10 - 2 Worked great till I added a 2nd one (oh wait that was PCI)
Focusrite Saffire - 2 flaky didnt like sound either
Alesis Multimix - 3 terrible

[Roc Mixwell]

Originally Posted by ipressrecord

I have a Black Lion Audio modded 828mk2 (clock and analog mod from 2006) which is rock solid, as well as an Apogee Duet that is also rock solid. I've been using the 828mk2 since 2003, and the Duet since last December. I actually sold a stock 828mk2 for the Duet and use it for most of my day to day audio work.

Jeff

How much of a difference/improvement would you say the Black Lion Mod made to the 828mk2?

[RBowlin]

RME FF800 has worked flawlessly for me. Sounds good too.

The worst? That's easy: Yamaha i88x. You'll commit suicide before you get it working properly.

-Rich

[junior]

Originally Posted by RBowlin

RME FF800 has worked flawlessly for me. Sounds good too.

The worst? That's easy: Yamaha i88x. You'll commit suicide before you get it working properly.

-Rich

Really? My i88x has worked problem-free. In fact, I ended up selling my Fireface because I didn't think it sounded $1000 better than the i88x. What specific problems did you have with it?

[rackdude]

You forgot the phonic firewire stuff. It's pretty good for what it does...

but its cheap because your buying a product without drivers of steel.

[digital lofi]

On PC here - but...

I had used the Alesis i|o26 for a while and while it has some great features and doesn't sound bad (to my non-golden ears) the driver situation is kind of a trainwreck - unless they've cleared it up recently. The pre-amps are lacking in gain which is not a huge problem - it does give you ample headroom - but the driver situation is such that I would pause before recommending it without serious reservation.

Then again, I didn't think the Fireface400 drivers were all that.

Just put in a LynxL22 and thus far I am completely blown away.

[bulls hit]

Guys, thanks for the good feedback. I've updated the 1st post again with the running totals.

Thus far there appear to be two broad groups:

1. RME, Echo, Mackie. If you get one of these units, it would appear you are almost guaranteed solid drivers and blissfully trouble-free operation


2. The rest (apart from Tascam which doesn't appear to have much market share down in the Low End). You could get lucky, or you could be buying yourself a world of hurt. Pretty much a crap shoot

[LeMauce]

M-audio projectmix I/O = 1. Really nice thing for the bucks and hell stable good drivers.
SSL Duende = 2. Had sum issue's with it but is turns out right and al good!

[bulls hit]

OK score 1 for M-Audio

[spjessop]

I use a Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 I/O with my Medion Centrino 1.6Ghz laptop. I bought the laptop reconditioned with a lovely new glossy screen.

The onboard TI firewire causes the Saffire to lose sync over time, but I already had an Adaptec Fireconnect card that works flawlessly.

I had some issues with pops and clicks which I eventually narrowed down to being my own fault as I had reduced the size of the memory allocation for the video. This laptop has shared memory. Back to it's default larger size it works perfectly and the laptop is much snappier now I have 2GB of RAM installed.

I'm quite aware that it's not going to be the greatest sound quality available but for the money it does just about everything I could ever want it to. The mixer is very useful but could do with some metering. In practice once monitoring levels are set off the meters in Sonar anyway and have no need to call up the Saffire mixer again. The unit itself could do with some RCA unbalanced outputs, but I have some jack to RCA adapters that make this a non issue in practice.

I guess it's somewhere between a 1 and 2 only due to my own mistakes. Up until I started fiddling with the BIOS on my Laptop it would have been a firm 1 and this stupidity could have messed up any interface I would have thought.

[SteveE9C6]

I had a Firepod that crashed and burned. While it was away getting fixed by Presonus under warranty, I picked up a new Mackie 400F Onyx. While some folks complained about the initial drivers, mine worked well. I did pick up the third party Centrance drivers but the recent Mackie driver update is rock solid. BTW, the difference in convertor quality was a significant step up from the Firepod.

[bulls hit]

Good info guys, scores updated

[D K]

Tascam's tech support sucks but the FW1884 is a very nice unit - Very decent A/D, highly expandable and centrace test reports 4.78 ms total round trip latency @ 64 samples - pretty damn good for $1100.00 -----

[asagaai]

Plus 1 for echo audiofire 12- when running by itself-never a click or pop-running 8 lines out summed analog and back in.

Presently running Hedd clocking audiofire 12, running 8 out DAW via audiofire 12 summed analog back in via Hedd occasional clicks - but still very operational. Combining Hedd with Lynx PC card with audiofire 12 (firewire) and being operational is testament to Echo

GJ
Newcastle/OZ

[bdlabs]

I recently got an Onyx 1640 with the FW option card. The board is fine, and the preamps sound great as advertised. But the FW card is another story. Physically it looks cheap... but the worst part is the driver it ships with. Awful noises from clock sync issues, ASIO drop outs, you name. Completely unusable for recording. So I got the CEntrance Ideal Driver and that helped somewhat. I could get the Onyx to record and playback without too many glitches.... but I had to push out the latency a lot. And everytime I started up the computer I had to do a special reset command to the Onyx. So I just sent the whole thing back to Mackie and I'm gonna get the 1200F... hopefully that goes better.
I also use a Digi 002 and that has always been stable for me.

[liquidorange]

just get the firepod fixed. you already know it works great. i believe some of the early models had solder problems. i had one worked on but in 3 years it has been bug free and stable.

[newfuturevintage]

have used an RME FF800 for the past few years. Excellent sound, rock solid drivers. =1

Have also used an maudio fw1814. iffy hardware build, so-so drivers, reasonable for the cash when working = 2

Both units on xp machines running sp2

[Albert]

I've owned a number of firewire interfaces.

MOTU Traveler: This has been trouble free from the day I bought it. Great solid drivers and sounds excellent.

Digi 002R: very solid also, no problems.

Presonus FireBox: No problems, but MOTU drivers better. Also, just didn't sound quite as good as the others. A very solid and practical unit though, you can definitely do good work with it.

Echo AudioFire2: nice ultra compact unit that has given me no problems.

Behringer FCA202: This is a piece of cr*p. Never could get it to work with my iBook, a laptop it should have been compatible with. Anything else on the Firewire or USB buss became unusable when the FCA202 was hooked up. There were also clicks, pops, dropouts, etc. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

[bulls hit]

Originally Posted by bdlabs

I recently got an Onyx 1640 with the FW option card. The board is fine, and the preamps sound great as advertised. But the FW card is another story. Physically it looks cheap... but the worst part is the driver it ships with. Awful noises from clock sync issues, ASIO drop outs, you name. Completely unusable for recording. So I got the CEntrance Ideal Driver and that helped somewhat. I could get the Onyx to record and playback without too many glitches.... but I had to push out the latency a lot. And everytime I started up the computer I had to do a special reset command to the Onyx. So I just sent the whole thing back to Mackie and I'm gonna get the 1200F... hopefully that goes better.
I also use a Digi 002 and that has always been stable for me.

Woah there goes Mackie's 100% perfect score...

[ECH]

What about the new Mackies with firewire cards?

I've seen the onyx 12 channel mixer packaged with a firewire for somewhere in the range of $700, i think.

[spons]

Originally Posted by rackdude

You forgot the phonic firewire stuff. It's pretty good for what it does...

but its cheap because your buying a product without drivers of steel.

If you read around the net you'll find that concensus is, the Phonic firewire mixers are the most stable interms of connection.

[LLSIII]

Motu mkI 828=never any problems, always rock-solid.

RME fireface 800=never any problems, always rock-solid.

Used them both on MAC-- OS9, OS10, ppc and INTEL, using DP3-DP5.

I'm going to go buy a lotto ticket now...

[bulls hit]

Thanks LLSIII. Numbers updated...