1 Topic by Khazul (edited by Khazul 2010-07-11 17:58:16)

  • Registered: 2010-07-11
  • Posts: 47

Topic: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

I am currently trying out a friend's Fireface 400 on a PC with Windows XP+SP3 and Windows 7/64 (dual boot) and it isnt looking good at all, definately not temping me to part with a bundle of cash to buy one, however im posting in the hope that someone might have a bright idea as to cause and fix.

The problem I have is that after a few minutes of use I get a BSOD or Ableton simply halts with a loud digital tone when using the Fireface 400.
What is more worrying, is that since removing the fireface drivers I am still getting the same halt and random digital tone with my Audio Kontrol 1 which has been absolutely fine until now.

So, two issues:
1. - Is the fireface actually relaible enough to consider or would I just be buying into flakey driver hell never actually getting any production work done. I will need it to work with windows 7/64 as well.
2. - What could the fireface drivers have done to my PC? Why are other audio interfaces now exhibiting the crashing behaviour when they have been fine until now?

The PC and OS/DAW details as follows:
Hardware - Gigabyte GA-X58a-UD3R motherboard, intel 930 i7 processor, 6GB ram. Fireface plugged into the onboard firewire port which is provided by a texas instrument firewire chipset. I have been using a Yamaha mLan (01x) audio interface without problems in this port.
DAW is Ableton Live 8.1.4.
OS is Windows XP+SP3.

Temperatures and DPC latency has been monitored to absolutely discount rising temperature related issues when PC is under load. CPU use on the track I was testing it with peaked at around 20%.

Fireface drivers tested are both of the latest (3016 and 29992). Sample rate 44.1 (Fireface doesnt seem to honour any change to sample rate and reports random rates etc in the RME settings after boot which isnt encouraging either). The fireface previously had the 1.69 firmware for the mac on it. For the short time it works before dying, seems actuually very good at low buffer sizes (tried various from 48 to 192). DPC latency on my PC idles around 5us unless I move the mouse etc - peaks at around 25us occasionally. So yes - when it work, Looks like a great audio interface, but TBH I really have absolutely zero interest in something that isnt going to be reliable, and definately no interest in something that has a risk of destroying my monitors and worse - ears.

Any other info required, please ask. Ive only seen the one BSOD, but the half ith loud tone is regular. BTW - when this happens the fireface needs to be power cycled in order to quieten it.

  • From: Portugal - Lisbon
  • Registered: 2007-05-01
  • Posts: 151

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

Have you got an extra pci interface to add more firewire ports to the machine? Give it a try.

Cheers.

Fireface 400 + DIGI96/8 PAD. It's old but works.

undercode's Website

  • Registered: 2010-07-11
  • Posts: 47

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

Thanks for your response.

I have a couple of spare pci-express slots (pci slot has my UAD-1 card in it) - one of which may get filled with a pci-e card for a multiface 2 if in the end I dont go for the fireface. TBH - I dont see what buying another firewire card would acheive (though I might have an old one kicking around somewhere) as I would only use a TI chipset card anyway, so i would have thought it would only chnage the interrupt asisgnments at best?

Anyway - if an RME fireface cant be made to work with its recommended chipset, then I'm better off looking elsewhere (ie non RME - doesnt mater how good the ADC/DAC is if the driver isnt reliable/too sensitive for me). Ive only got this for a few days, so no time to order cards etc. Anyway - should work - its a TI chipset, modern motherboard (perhaps too modern?).

One note of concern, I did notice the Microsoft TI OHCI driver in XP+SP3 is dated 2001 (5.1.2535.0) - very very old - any known more recent drivers I should be looking at?
Im guessing not as this would be the same driver Ive been using with other firewire audio interfaces - and with way more channels.

  • From: Portugal - Lisbon
  • Registered: 2007-05-01
  • Posts: 151

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

I already tested it with a Nec and VIA chipsets. Also working on Lucent chipset on my white Macbook. I don't think that is a Fireface-Driver based problem or a specific firewire chipset driver. It's something about windows configuration because I had problems like that one with my Windows XP configuration once.
Try to do something real stupid that could solve things (in XP sometimes it has to be done after adding new stuff to the machine...):

- Uninstall all IDE - PATA / SATA drivers and RAID also if present.
- Uninstall all firewire drivers.
- Uninstall Fireface drivers.
- Unplug Fireface.
- Restart Windows.
- Let Windows detect and install all IDE drivers and onboard Firewire. If you want Windows to detect one by one, you could deactivate onboard Firewire on BIOS and activate it later after all IDE device discover and fresh reboot.
- Plug Fireface back again.

I know that this sounds ridiculous but sometimes Windows behavior is ridiculous (my Explorer.exe sometimes doesn't boot... It's completely random...).

Here on the forum they strongly advice us to use T.I. firewire cards but I can state that my Fireface 400 is working with constant swaps between PC and Mac without a single problem and none of them have the Texas Instruments firewire chipset.

Feel free to ask more about it or to post any slight change of behavior because it's always a pleasure to help the community.

Cheers!

Fireface 400 + DIGI96/8 PAD. It's old but works.

undercode's Website

5 Reply by improbabilitist (edited by improbabilitist 2010-07-13 19:04:28)

  • Registered: 2010-07-13
  • Posts: 7

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

I've had similar issues with testing the FF400, but I have a JMicron chipset.
When enabling the inputs/outputs of the FF400 in Ableton, it would crash and produce a BSOD.

undercode wrote:

- Uninstall all IDE - PATA / SATA drivers and RAID also if present.

Does this also affect my SSD drive (I only have 1)?

.edit:
Win7 64bit
Core2Quad Q9000
4GB DDR3 RAM

  • Registered: 2010-07-11
  • Posts: 47

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

I have a suspicion that some left over junk courtesy of Yamaha might be the cause of my XP issues.

I have installed it on Windows 7/64 and it seems to be running about as well as can be expected for such an appalling io-unfriendly excuse for an operating system - on xp - dpc is between 5 and 25us, mostly sitting at around 5-10 with no special effort to disable stuff etc, win 7/64 on the same hardware about 125+ until I start disabling devices, then it seems I can get it down to about 35 or so with everything that can be disabled except the boot hard discs controller (ie to the point of utterly useless computer).

I have to wonder what on earth MS have done in the kernel to cause this - its appalling compared to XP, though possibly not as bad as vista.

How are others faring on Win7/64 (ultimate)? Is there some magic (and utterly useless) component in Win 7/64 that anyone knows of that is the cause of the dramatic difference from XP? Power management? Some new kernel code security feature perhaps? USB driver performance difference seems to be a biggy, but when its still at 35 or so with allmost everything that can be disabled disabled, then it seems to be somethign very fundamental to the kernel when XP is a tiny fraction of this with everyting enabled.

Sorry - I guess this is degenerating into a win7 sux thread rather than a how to get an FF400 working hmm

  • From: Portugal - Lisbon
  • Registered: 2007-05-01
  • Posts: 151

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

improbabilitist wrote:

Does this also affect my SSD drive (I only have 1)?

Well, I'm not sure about that because I don't have a SSD drive but I think that, if BIOS recognizes it at start up, it should auto-install it normally as Windows does with other drives.

Khazul: From my empirical knowledge, all Fireface problems were OS related. Windows XP gave me an headache but now it's done. I think that all of that is related with the IRQ and DMA auto-share that Windows randomly assigns when the devices are installed. That's why I always suggest to uninstall the most critical devices and let windows re-assign them.

This is just an example, not a solution:
- On Windows XP if you switch from ACPI Multiprocessor PC to Single PC, the problems with Fireface end (worked with me) but new problems born. One of them is not getting enough IRQ's for all devices.

Stay in touch.

Cheers!

Fireface 400 + DIGI96/8 PAD. It's old but works.

undercode's Website

  • Registered: 2010-07-13
  • Posts: 7

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

I'm afraid that this thread says it all sad

9 Reply by Khazul (edited by Khazul 2010-07-14 15:07:54)

  • Registered: 2010-07-11
  • Posts: 47

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

improbabilitist wrote:

I'm afraid that this thread says it all sad

I read that thread before starting this one - however if you look at the post dates, they are early this year - ie along time before the current driver releases, and I guess at a time when win7/64 drivers were still in an early state.

Ironically, I actually find the FF400 ok ish under windows 7/64 - my problem there is with the actual OS and what seems to be a generally flawed kernel/io subsystem and not the FF driver which I guess just has to make the best of what appears to be a bad situation for pro-audio.

With all that said, I do think the FF400 drivers are simply not very robust - they seem way too sensitive which is a fine approach to take when developing embedded code, but software that is to work on a general purpose computer simply needs to be more robust - it just seems way way too easy to get BSOD's and other flavours of crashing, at this point in time, while it is working, I am nervous. It aint good when you are afraid to turn the volume up in case it crashes.

I can remember this problem with my Access Virus TI - it got to the point where many user where afraid to let it loose on a loud monitoring system for fear of those deadly crash tones. Perhaps if Access had invested some time in providing some kind of protection - users might have been far less upset. Flakey drivers seem to be a fact of life, but some products actually manage to crash silently, whereas others crash and make their best attempt to take your monitors and ears with it (strange - in my experience it allways seem to be german origin applications hardware and drivers that crash loudly? maybe germans have tougher ears than the rest of us smile)

Much as I utterly hate yamaha these days for ditching support of mlan and keaving people stranded with useless and expensive hardware, at least when it crashed, it crashed quietly. I would be very happy if RME would kindly add some kind of fullproof crash clamp to thier interfaces to force them to go silent the instant something looks dodgy to save our ears and gear. at least then I wouldnt be nervous about using it and could forgive the odd crash - so long as the crashes are silent!

  • Registered: 2007-10-15
  • Posts: 15

Re: Thinking of Buying a Fireface (probably 400) but it seems very flakey?

Don't do it. 

From my experience with a Dell laptop and a FF400 you'll just spend hours watching the computer re-start, and have your ears assaulted by digital drones and audio stuttering.  I wanted to use it live - no chance.  Can't even get to the end of a song reliably.

shame.

J