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pcrecord 17 September 2014

Hi,
I have some problems with my Saffire56 and I think about having a backup alternative to record.
My important gear goes in ADAT

which one would be your choice

Comments

audiokid Wed, 09/17/2014 - 16:40

Based on my experiences to date, pcie is by far superior, especially if you are using this for midi and tracking and need lower latency . But, I use USB or FW for my capture DAW with doesn't require all the fuss and needed lower latency for tracking.
RME is very stable so I'm sure either of the two you are considering will work just fine.

The Digiface is more portable.

Boswell Thu, 09/18/2014 - 04:04

What we now call Parallel PCI is the original PCI interface, and came in various flavours and voltages, including 32-bit and 64-bit using standard and wide connectors. Wikipedia calls it "[="http://en.wikipedia…"]conventional PCI[/]="http://en.wikipedia…"]conventional PCI[/]".

[[url=http://="http://en.wikipedia…"]PCIe[/]="http://en.wikipedia…"]PCIe[/] is the more recent, serial form of the bus, and again has 3 different widths: x1, x4, x16, but this refers to the number of serial pairs that connect to the slot.

PC motherboards until recently used to provide one or sometimes two parallel PCI slots along with their assortment of serial PCI, but many of the newer motherboards I have seen do not have any parallel slots. Parallel and serial motherboard slots are physically and electrically incompatible.

Boswell Thu, 09/18/2014 - 10:09

Fine, but it's worth thinking about what you do when you want to get a new motherboard and keep your audio interfaces.

I'm not very well up on the RME internal card range, but it could be that something like the HDSPe AIO would give you a sufficiently close match to the features of the HDSP 9652 but using the more future-proof PCIe bus. In addition, PCIe interfaces generally have higher performance than the older parallel PCI cards and are less affected by other installed boards producing interrupts, streaming DMA etc.

DaveLab Sat, 01/01/2022 - 08:38

My first impression is that the pci (9652) would be more stable compare to the digiface that is FireWire dependant..

Just to set the record straight: the Digiface doesn't use Firewire. It uses the same cable and connectors as Firewire, but uses its own proprietary communications protocol over those.

I have always found my original (PCI) Digiface to be quite stable. I would base my choice of 9652 vs. Digiface on form factor logistics, not stability. They're probably equal in stability. I always found the external interface box of the Digiface very handy compared to a bunch of cables going to the back of my PC. YMMV.

pcrecord Tue, 01/04/2022 - 05:04

RME always had their own thing regarding gear development. 

Compared to other makers, they go the long way to offer the best quality gear and drivers. They went as far as creating their own chips (Converters, firewire, USB etc).

With that in mind when I bought my Fireface UFX, I had the choice of using firewire or USB. After many tests I was very surprised to discover the USB connection is solid and stable. Since I wanted to keep my FIreface 800 to power headphone mixes, I now work the 800 on firewire and the UFX on USB without any glitches. WIth the UFX on USB, I filled the channel count to 24 ch at 24/96khz (using every ports, analog, ADAT and AES) and tracking isn't an issue at all.. 

audiokid Wed, 01/05/2022 - 11:34

RME is excellent. I've achieved excellent results on Windows OS with RME interfaces and their drivers, especially when interfaces are connected to dedicated USB or Firewire ports, free for only interfacing.

I've been able to run all sorts of converters with large track counts without problems when the converter has its own dedicated port/bus. 2, 8, 16, 32 channel adda  MADI, FW, USB.

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