RME Fireface 400 vs NI / Tascam

[lorcamusic]

Hey guys,

I just got my hands on a second hand Fireface 400.

I bought a Firewire PCI card to plug it in, installed the drivers - everything working ok.

1st thing I notice is that the audio crashes after streaming YouTube for 20 mins or so, restart the computer works ok, then crashes after 20 mins again.

Then I load up a project in Cubase using the Fireface interface/drivers as my audio device.

I put the buffer settings on full (1024). It cannot handle the project at all, buffer is completely overloaded. It works perfectly well on a new project with no VSTs running, but quickly overloads even on a basic project with around 10 - 20 plugins.

I then switch out the audio interface for my other interface (Tascam 208i) using USB 2.0. Now this same project runs completely fine, no issues, no buffering.

I thought RME were great interfaces, so I am surprised I am having all these issues. What could be causing this?

1. Could it be the Firewire PCI card I am using?
2. Could it be the cable I am using. It's Firewire 400 6 pin to the small firewire connection into the computer (4 pin)?
3. Is the unit faulty?

What else could this be?

Thanks for your help.
Sam

 

[AdamG]

Hey guys,

I just got my hands on a second hand Fireface 400.

I bought a Firewire PCI card to plug it in, installed the drivers - everything working ok.

1st thing I notice is that the audio crashes after streaming YouTube for 20 mins or so, restart the computer works ok, then crashes after 20 mins again.

Then I load up a project in Cubase using the Fireface interface/drivers as my audio device.

I put the buffer settings on full (1024). It cannot handle the project at all, buffer is completely overloaded. It works perfectly well on a new project with no VSTs running, but quickly overloads even on a basic project with around 10 - 20 plugins.

I then switch out the audio interface for my other interface (Tascam 208i) using USB 2.0. Now this same project runs completely fine, no issues, no buffering.

I thought RME were great interfaces, so I am surprised I am having all these issues. What could be causing this?

1. Could it be the Firewire PCI card I am using?
2. Could it be the cable I am using. It's Firewire 400 6 pin to the small firewire connection into the computer (4 pin)?
3. Is the unit faulty?

What else could this be?

Thanks for your help.
Sam

Welcome Aboard @lorcamusic.

 

[lorcamusic]

Thanks for the welcome @AdamG247!

Seems like it was an issue with my Firewire PCI card, I swapped the port on my motherboard and changed the input socket. Now working a lot better. Still not as good as the Tascam 208i in terms of buffering but it's working!

 

[AnalogSteph]

How old (or rather new) is your system? Native PCI hasn't been around since at least Haswell at this point, and I imagine not every Firewire 400 chipset would take operating behind a PCIe-PCI bridge equally well. If things work better in another slot, interrupt sharing may also be a factor, as it often was in the olden days.

Normally I would expect something Firewire to work better than USB (if memory serves it's basically emulating a SCSI bus internally, much like the later UASP does for USB), but I wouldn't put my bets on it with modern hardware.

 

[dfuller]

What could be causing this?

The firewire card. Firewire is so deprecated that the good 1394 interface chips are long out of production, and software support is basically nonexistent at this point.

 

[lorcamusic]

Hey guys, thanks for the feedback on this. The PC is pretty new (2018) 9th gen intel, new but things now seemed to have stabilized and the crashing has stopped. Moving to a different PCI slot seems to have helped, as does using legacy drivers for the firewire card.