On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 13:59 +0400, Dmitry Baikov wrote: > Hello! > I'm in the process of choosing mobile audio interface for both live sets > and studio recording. > I need minimal possible latency and 8x8 analog I/O. 8 channels across USB? forget it. USB can stretch to about 4 channels before things start to fall apart. YMMV, but this is what i've seen in many win/mac audio forums. > Is it possible in practice? And for what number of channels? Also, is FW > much better than USB2 and why? yes, its much better: vastly higher bandwidth, much faster bus clock. > As for FW solution, FreeBob project's site states FA-101 works, but I'd > like to know about minimal possible latency. And does it have any > restrictions on buffers/frequency setup? not sure. > As for RME Multiface ($700) + Cardbus ($390) (for notebook) + PCI ($300) > (for desktop), it's much more expensive solution, and AFAIK it's hard to > find notebook with appropriate PCMCIA controller to get 64-sample > (minimal) buffers to work reliable. i'm not sure that its that hard anymore. kernel 2.6 seemed to have fixes for most of the cardbus/pci bridge chipsets that removed problems with low latency. 64 frame/period reliability has a lot more to do with the rest of the system than the PCMCIA controller, in my experience. for example, on kernel 2.4, my cardbus controller worked fine for anything *below* 256 frames/period (but not above); my kernel wasn't well patched enough to make that work reliably at 64 frames/period. --p
