Hi all,

The company I am with is currently deals a lot in recording audio in the offshore industry for mitigation during activities. Firefaces are one of the units we use to cover mid-range frequencies up to 96khz data/48khz audible, with other tech handling higher frequencies.

The Firefaces appealed due to their pedigree in the sound industry, and have proven durable despite all our lugging around of the kit all over the world. Still, some of our laptops used to run and record the data we gather do not have native Firewire ports, so we had been using PC Express cards for some time in these. These are dime-a-dozen cards from generic brands, featuring 2 Firewire 400 ports and fit into the 34mm slot for the PC Express on our laptops.

In the last six months or so, incompatibilities have begun to arise between these cards and the Fireface. There was a stage where using this setup had left all of these computers unable to recognise USB ports and blue screening on shutdown, which was alarming. Now they simply do not acknowledge each other, there is no notice on the laptops that the Fireface is connected, and the Fireface shows the red Host LED which I understand indicates it is disconnected at the Firewire port. There is naturally a tested and functioning cable between these two, so the setup should work, but doesn't.

The laptops are Fujitsu Lifebook NH751s, with an Intel Core i7-2630QM @2GHz, Windows 7 Professional, 4GB RAM, NVidia GT525M and a 750GB HDD.

Thanks in advance,
Jamie