Mark, you are exactly right. I got a little baffled by the rme naming scheme. Seems like it would've been easy enough to avoid the #'s 9652 in subsequent non-compatible models...</microrant> Ive been trying to collect the fragments of info from all the pertinent lists, and here's where I'm stuck this time(!) going out on a limb and using 2.4.22-ck2 instead of a patched vanilla kernel (bad idea?), bumped down to alsa-driver/lib/tools 0.9.2 and now there's a successful module load of rme9652. Module Size Used by Tainted: P snd-mixer-oss 13592 0 (autoclean) snd-rme9652 18660 3 snd-pcm 66400 2 [snd-rme9652] snd-timer 16520 0 [snd-pcm] snd 34148 1 [snd-mixer-oss snd-rme9652 snd-pcm snd-timer] snd-page-alloc 5456 0 [snd-pcm] snd-hammerfall-mem 1888 0 [snd-rme9652] rtc 8200 0 (autoclean) nvidia 1628128 8 also, I can see signal on xmms, it plays, but no sound, so I guess the stream is flowing. I'm confused about alsamixer, though, cause it says "No mixer elems found" and fails. To further complicate my situation, I HAVE to be able to use the spdif out because there's limited access to any ADAT optical devices (for now). A few questions if I may: What is the ideal perfect best configuration (kernel/alsa/etc) for this card? Are there limitations with any of the IO (duplex spdif working?) Should I worry about firmware or rev or eprom? Is it true that I can forget about the numbers 9636, cause every digi9636 is really a digi9652 as far as drivers are concerned(?) I saw an rme9652 control-panel GUI and (of course) failed to bookmark it and now cant relocate it. Is there such a thing? Is it "good"? Some postings seem to suggest that .asoundrc file is not needed, but that sounds very strange. True? btw, if anyone cares to throw a working-with-spdif rme9652 .asoundrc at me, id be a happy camper, and yes, i know they're out there, but I want YOURS cause you're a part of this list of brainiacs... THANKS!! (it's been a mind-numbing 3 days of list-spelunking...starting to worry that i blew $300 on the wrong card...) :-) > WR, > Hi. The info below seems inconsistent. It appears that you have a > Hammerfall card (either 9652 or 9636) and not the HDSP 9632. from the > lspci > results. Is this the case? > > If so, you should be loading the driver for the Hammerfall > (snd-rme9652) > and not the driver for the HDSP family. (snd-hdsp) > > Mark