Is it possible to connect my Firewire 800 audio interface to an AMD system?
I have no idea what's all that about but what I can do is to thank you for the gibs and give you a bump for visibility. Hope you'll find the answer!
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Yeah, what Movac said. Firewire was all Apple-specific, and then when Presonus started forcing everyone to use the interface (because they control ProTools), it started showing up on PCs, but wasn't implemented very well. That's what happens when you compete with a perfectly good standard that literally everyone else is using (at the time, USB 2.x). ζ༼Ɵ͆ل͜Ɵ͆༽ᶘ
Anyway, Firewire seems to be mostly on its way out, so your best solution so that you don't limit your other hardware choices based upon quickly-disappearing tech is to just buy an interface card.
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I couldn't find an Am4 motherboard with firewire (probably because they don't exist), but I am not sure if a pcie to firewire card will work in an AMD system.
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see answer below.
firewire is "outdated", that's why you could not find an am4 board with firewire. most people would go with USB 3.1 Gen 2. It's way faster and add even more options
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I am not sure if a firewire 800 card would work in an AMD system. In the same way that a Thunderbolt card doesn't work in an AMD system.
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someone told you something wrong.
the amd cpu dosn't support thunderbolt and most mainboards don't have a thunderbolt chip installed but even an amd system could work with a controllercard.
but thunderbolt was intel exclusive and it's super expensive to get the rights to sell/produce a controlercard.
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so unlike thunderbolt, firewire isn't intel exclusive?
that's good news!
thanks for the quick reaction.
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Firewire is an Apple thing and years out of date, so there's little point in walling them off. You can use a PCI-E expansion card with any motherboard that offers a slot, be it Intel, AMD or anything else.
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Yes ^^^^
The interface here is PCIe...point is that the chip on the card does the task-specific processing, not the CPU.
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Firewire is dead. Completely. It is a task to find any kind of motherboard with a Firewire connector in it and exactly zero modern ones support it. And it was not Intel-exclusive, ASRock had a socket AM3+ board with Firewire.
Just get a PCI-E to Firewire card.
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I just assumed it was intel exclusive. Thank you for the info, that is very useful! I guess I will have to waste a pcie connection for a firewire card. An Am4 motherboard with firewire is going to be impossible to find.
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As already mentioned, you need an external controller in form of external pcie card.
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There are certainly cheaper USB audio interfaces but I doubt they would do the same job.
I do some sound production and my PC is mostly built for backwards compatibility for an old audio interface that I really don't want to replace. 24-bit/96kHz AD/DA with multiple dedicated inputs and outputs in multiple formats, hardware MIDI timing, dedicated low latency ASIO software and drivers, multiple internal preamps, etc. I'm guessing if his audio interface was Firewire it would have been something comparable.
With USB 3.0 I think there are some serious USB alternatives now - but they aren't cheaper than a PCIe Firewire controller, and most of the better options seem to use Thunderbolt and/or Firewire (still).
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What's your audio interface?
Btw USB 3.0 is just another marketing trick...
There's a great article explaining why USB 3.0 aint gonna help with latency.
https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208095469-USB-2-0-vs-USB-3-0
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That was actually an interesting article - I actually used to work as a sound engineer but I've been otherwise employed for several years and haven't been keeping up to date with changing technology, so I had wondered about USB 3.0...
To be honest I mostly use an old Terratec DMX 6fire system which I really love. It's fortunately a PCIe card with a breakout box connected with dedicated cables, so it has proved fairly resilient in terms of hardware compatability - but as they haven't updated the drivers recently I'm struggling for windows compatability. Managed to get my MIDI devices running with Cubase and loads of VST plugins with no noticeable latency under Windows 7 though.
I've also got an old firewire M-Audio that I mostly use with my laptop. With regards to your original question - a Firewire PCIe card will work fine in an AMD system, although that mostly seemed to have been thoroughly answered by the time I got here...
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I can't blame you, I still love my EMU 1212m which works on a legacy PCI slot and it was a challenge to make it work on Windows 10...
With a firewire card most likely he won't have any issue and it's the cheapest solution, therefore my vote is a big YES.
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most of the better options seem to use Thunderbolt and/or Firewire
Is this true? Then those companies live out of this world, as Talgaby said: "Firewire is dead. Completely."
Also, USB 2.0 is more than enough for an audio interface. Read the link posted by TheMisterT.
the USB 2.0 protocol is still the most efficient technology for professional multichannel recording for the channel counts our USB devices provide.
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It is true. Plenty of high-end audio interfaces still include Firewire connectivity (although certainly not exclusively, and always alongside other options - typically Thunderbolt). It certainly isn't for practical reasons though, I suspect just to accomodate certain enthusiasts. I'd agree Firewire is dead.
USB 2.0 is certainly more than enough for professional multichannel recording if that is all you are doing, and if all that was people used audio interfaces for that would be fine. The problem is latency. If you are using high end audio software recording/playing multiple audio tracks through an audio interface and alongside that recording MIDI data from devices also plugged into an audio interface which may simultaneously then be generating audio based on the MIDI input through multiple layers of virtual synthesisers while also being played back through the audio interface then that is where you may well start getting delays with USB 2.0. In fact you are pretty much guaranteed problems doing half of that.
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In theory that can be a problem, but I haven't seen anything like that so far unless we're talking about a humongous project.
Adding you on Steam to talk about that when you have some time, because chatting is way better than posting ;)
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Either a humongous project or when I did my BTEC in sound engineering during evening classes and I had to record demos for the shitty bands from the full-time courses at the music college. "Oh yeah, can you do it like that but with that thing from the keyboard just on the drummers headphones so he knows what he's doing and we can follow him..."
Technologically it would have been easier to tell them to behave, and probably I went a bit far to prove a point. But given that I've had severe latency issues on far simpler set ups I would suggest that simple multi-channel recording is the least could be expected of a decent audio interface...
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https://uk.focusrite.com/firewire-audio-interfaces/saffire-pro-40 - This might be what I would probably get if I was still doing it professionally and could justify the expense.
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That's a pretty old model, a simple google search led me to this:
sell your Pro 40 and get the Scarlett 18i20, which is the exact same unit, only it's USB.
https://us.focusrite.com/usb-audio-interfaces/scarlett-18i20
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Just a minor note: 2nd Gen because some shops still selling the 1st Gen.
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Either way it's a hell of a lot more expensive than a PCIe Firewire card, to answer your original post. And personally I'd take the Pro 40 - low latency USB is relative, the same as low-fat cheese isn't necessarily all that healthy...
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Yes of course, if we are talking about professional gear it's better to buy the PCIe card. I asked because a simple external sound card is an audio interface too :)
Latency is a complex issue. The USB interface uses CPU power and, depending on drivers (the USB drivers themselves and the audio interface drivers) you can experiment more or less latency with the same equipment. But with a modern PC or Mac you should not have any trouble with USB at least. The most important thing is the quality of the propietary drivers from each vendor (Focusrite in this case). If the driver is well optimised you should get the same performance as you got with an old FireWire device.
Look at the different latency values depending on the OS (Win vs. OS X) with the same equipment and software:
https://us.focusrite.com/scarlett-in-depth#low-latency
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Myself I thought it fair to assume as it was a Firewire interface it was professional gear - most audio interfaces intended for gaming and other home media use were only ever USB.
Latency is indeed a massively complex issue with multiple contributing factors. My own experiences are that (firstly) achieving very low latency is a very difficult process and once people have a set-up that works they are very reluctant to change it and that (secondly) very low latency is difficult to achieve using USB audio interfaces.
And also if there was a (thirdly) and (fourthly) it is that driver conflicts are more important than drivers and that drivers won't overcome hardware limitations.
The post that OP linked and that you referred to did indeed state that USB was fine for multi-channel recording but did discuss the fundamental issues regarding latency.
To clarify, my original point when posting in this topic were that although there are cheaper USB audio interfaces than PCIe Firewire cards that OP was unlikely to get a like-for-like replacement for less than a PCIe Firewire card. I consider that true and I also remain unconvinced regarding the maximum performance of USB audio interfaces when handling MIDI data during a complex session without latency.
But I have said that it's been a while since this was my job and I'm unfamiliar with USB 3.0 alternatives - I just disputed that although USB 2.0 was fine for recording that it was demonstrably insufficient for all functions of a professional audio interface.
With that I have done my best to make my position clear. If you want it argue beyond that then please clarify on exactly which points.
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I agree with your argument, the only thing I wanted to say if that USB 2.0 is more than enough for that particular equipment (scarlett-18i20) and that you will not get worse performance using USB than with the older one (the one you chose, the saffire-pro-40).
Frankly, I don't want to talk about latency in USB interfaces because, as you remarked, is a massively complex issue and there's a lot of info on the Internet :) I'll only say that you can achieve very low latency with USB, as low as no human could distinguish it from a FireWire counterpart.
Regarding the Focusrite link, I posted it to show how different latencies are from one OS to another, so the drivers are basically the key. A Mac is an Intel PC with OS X, so obviously if you get better performance (latency) with a Mac is because their drivers (USB and/or vendor's) are better.
Regards.
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USB 2.0 is more than enough for a scarlett-18i20 as long as you are doing certain things (although nothing in your link suggested those stats were for a scarlett-18i20 running on USB 2.0). But audio interfaces and DAWs are as complex an arena as graphics cards and gaming. I might be able to get a given game running on an old graphics card but does that mean I would get 60fps at 4k resolution? If one game ran well could I expect every other game to run well? Could I judge graphics cards properly based on their performance on a very limited selection of games?
It is a complex issue that involves many issues beyond simply the hardware of the audio interface. I'm trying to avoid internet arguments but this is one I'm going to bite on unless you have better qualifications than me. I spent no small amount of time at college with assholes on this one.
You can achieve very low latency with USB, as low as no human could distinguish it from a FireWire counterpart - but only as long as you are doing certain things with it. An obsolete graphics card might be indistinguishable from a new high-end graphics card but only as long as you use it at very low resolutions. That doesn't mean the older graphics card is as good in in all scenarios.
The performance of the hardware on different operating systems isn't really relevant. It's the same hardware - it's just differences in OS and drivers. Comparisons against different hardware and on different software are relevant. Strangely your link only provided comparisons against different hardware on one OS. It only provided comparisons against other hardware on software that would have been less affected by the limitations of USB - noticeably it compared Cubase performance on different operating systems but it was not amongst the software it compared against other hardware. Many would consider Cubase a far better test for sound production rather than just recording, which is where latency becomes an issue.
It might not have been obvious to yourself if you are unfamiliar with the details - but I feel the link/stats you provided were very heavily biased in favour of the hardware and its limitations.
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I'm only saying: you don't need anything better than USB to run a Scarlett 18i20 at 100% and you will not get better performance with the Saffire Pro 40.
There are probably better audio interfaces where the USB 2.0 would be a bottleneck, of course, but that will be because of bandwidth, not latency. I mean, with a Thunderbolt interface (Thunderbolt is the equivalent of a modern FireWire) you'll be able to use 10 times more channels than with a FireWire interface but you will also need a much more powerful equipment than the one you mentioned. I mean, if you'd simply add a Thunderbolt interface to that Saffire/Scarlett you will not get better performance because it would not make use of so much bandwidth.
Using your graphic card analogy, it would be like connecting a GTX 1080 to a Pentium IV. It would work but it'll run at 10% of its power because the Pentium architecture is not fast enough to take advantage of a modern GTX.
Since the beginning I was only talking about that particular model. You know engineers are, in general, smart people, they know what they do when they design an interface. You can also find info on the internet from other models with both USB and FireWire interface where the USB version has even lower latency.
I think you had a bad experience with one particular model and you're extrapolating. Also, the OS latency management has improved a lot in the last years, with things like properly implemented Message Signaled Interrupts for example, both at hardware and software (OS and drivers) level.
Some people might experience high latency with a USB interface, but that will probably be because of anything except the USB interface.
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I started to write a long winded response to the various points you raised, but then decided I was clearly wasting my time in the face of how quickly you feel you can become a leading expert in anything on a foundation of baseless assumptions and a few minutes in google, not to mention your ability to shift goalposts and completely ignore perfectly valid points. I would just be asking for even more utter bullshit in response.
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You may call it "a few minutes in google", I prefer to call it decades of experience. You obviously don't have any respect to your interlocutor and you choose to attack me instead of refuting my argument so it's better to stop this inane debate now. I can see you have experience with some kind of old legacy audio interfaces but you seem to ignore how things work underneath all those layers of software and drivers.
Regards.
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Also I notice that your link https://us.focusrite.com/scarlett-in-depth#low-latency doesn't appear to be comparing latency in certain very popular software or with certain popular hardware...
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In fact I would suggest that https://us.focusrite.com/scarlett-in-depth#low-latency is deliberately avoiding direct comparisons with other hardware in Cubase and other software that might focus on sound production rather than just recording. Although it gives performance it doesn't give a comparison against other hardware in that category...
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firewire isn't intel specific, it actually came from apple to begin with in fact. it's just rather outdated and rarely used, so manufacturers quit bothering putting in on the mainboard. as others suggested though, just get a pci/pcie card for it. ;)
edit: to clarify, yes.. most apples are intel chips nowadays, however the firewire tech came from apple back in their motorola chip days. xD
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I want to buy a new desktop computer, and I have been doing a little bit of research.
I have an audio interface with a firewire 800 connection, and I want to keep using it.
I know that thunderbolt is (still) only for Intel based systems. And I believe Firewire is too?
My question:
Is it indeed impossible to make an AMD system with a Firewire 800 port?
thanks!
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