[PlanetCCRMA] Suggestion for sound card

[Sean Beeson]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:17 PM, JOHN LYON <jalyon at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a focusrite SAFFIRE Pro IO 26, and the SAFFIRE Pro IO 10 howto helped
> me a lot.  Everything described there is pretty much the same.
>
> I had a problem with a older firewire card (Texas Instruments, but from
> 1999!).  I replaced it with a new PCI firewire card that happened to be a
> Texas Instruments chipset as well. Voila!  That's when my focusrite SAFFIRE
> Pro IO 26 started working.  So it's probably true that getting the right
> firewire card can be very important on Linux.  My old card still works fine
> on Windows...
>
> It is important to run ffado-mixer when using the focusrite SAFFIRE Pro
> boards; for one thing, you need ffado-mixer to set the headphone levels and
> to turn on phantom power on the 2 sets of mic preamp channels (you can turn
> on phontom power on channels 1-4 and/or 5-5 from the ffado-mixer software).
> Since there is no way to do this from the hardware, you have to install and
> run ffado-mixer to use these features.
>
> Hope this is useful,
>
> John Lyon

Hi John and list,

What specific PCI firewire card did you use? Does anyone else know of
cards that use the needed Texas Instruments chipset?

Also, a more general question to the whole list, if I am using
something that is on the ffado.org's supported device list as having
"Full Support" is the ffado-mixer known to work well with other
devices other than the SAFFIRE Pros? I learned from the USB M-Audio
Fast Track Pro that, although it works and sounds great, I do not have
as much control over it as I would if there was software that
specifically managed it. ALSA sees all of it's devices, but it seems
Jack doesn't like to see or use all of them. After getting PlanetCCRMA
to work with the USB M-Audio and now mainly composing with my system
as well as needing inputs for more devices from the analog world I
have out grown my first audio interface and realize I should go with
firewire from this point on. In Japan the Endirol interfaces are the
most common and the least expensive. Does anyone know how Endirol
firewire audio interfaces compare audio quality wise with the other
fully support ffado devices out there? Since the need for more and
better seems to come up pretty fast and if the Endirols don't sound
very good compared to other firewire interfaces or if there are other
caveats in this decision, it would be nice to know.

Thanks and kind regards,

--Sean