New Thunderbolt Audio Interface Card

[William Bushnell]

Universal Audio Ships Thunderbolt Option Card for Apollo Audio Interface.

http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/universal_audio_ships_thunderbolt_option_card_for_ apollo_audio_interface/
_____________
William Bushnell

[gdougherty]

Oddly enough, all the Thunderbolt interfaces so far are relatively low channel count devices.

[ssrsound]

well, the Thunderbolt card turns the two firewire ports on that device into individual pass-through Firewire ports. So theoretically, you could use that one Thunderbolt connection to reach two different firewire interfaces. So you could connect to 2 Profire 2626's, each connected to two more ADA-type devices... and thus get 48x48.

...of course you could do that before using FireWire. But now you can do it using a tiny Mac Mini or one of the upcoming Intel NUC boxes (which have no firewire nor card slots).


But yeah. I kept hoping they'd come up with a real multi-I/O device for it.

[RBIngraham]

Just give me an affordable Thunderbolt to PCI or PCIe card slot device. Then we can use the stuff we already have.

[gdougherty]

well, the Thunderbolt card turns the two firewire ports on that device into individual pass-through Firewire ports. So theoretically, you could use that one Thunderbolt connection to reach two different firewire interfaces. So you could connect to 2 Profire 2626's, each connected to two more ADA-type devices... and thus get 48x48.

...of course you could do that before using FireWire. But now you can do it using a tiny Mac Mini or one of the upcoming Intel NUC boxes (which have no firewire nor card slots).


But yeah. I kept hoping they'd come up with a real multi-I/O device for it.

Think you're reading it wrong. The FireWire ports turn into FireWire ports like your have on a host, but there's nothing special allowing them to aggregate units that can't be aggregated in the first place. Profire would still leave you with 24 channels unless you ran software that did the aggregation for you.

[ssrsound]

I thought the Profire driver could run multiple units if they were all visible. I could be wrong, though... I've not actually tried that.

[gdougherty]

I thought the Profire driver could run multiple units if they were all visible. I could be wrong, though... I've not actually tried that.

Nope, most FireWire interfaces don't aggregate multiple units that I've seen.

[RBIngraham]

Nope, most FireWire interfaces don't aggregate multiple units that I've seen.

That's really an M Audio thing. Echo Audio will definitely do it. I use it all the time to throw on an Audiofire 4 to my 8 or 12 just to get a few more outputs. You can mix and match any Audiofire units. I think there is a limit, but it's pretty high and the firewire interface will usually give way before you reach the limit. Technically I think Echo doesn't limit you, but in reality they told me 3 or 4 units is practical depending on which model you're linking together.

I am pretty sure MOTU allows for more than one of some of their firewire interfaces. But don't quote me on that.


It all about drivers obviously. These better manufacturers get it and write appropriate drivers.

I've always found M Audio to have crap drivers. The Profire 26 unit is about the only audio interface from them I would even consider touching. The rest are real crap.

[gdougherty]

Don't believe the focusrite or presonus units do either. Using multiple fw devices would probably require multiple fw chips since the bandwidth on one would mostly get consumed by the audio data and the overhead. 32 channels seems to be pushing the boundaries of a single chip. They seem geared toward laptop recording and in most cases managing to get more than one fw chip on the system would be a rarity.

Edit: The echo offerings only manage about 16x16 at the most anyway, so it makes a bit more sense to hang a second interface off the first.

[RBIngraham]

Don't believe the focusrite or presonus units do either. Using multiple fw devices would probably require multiple fw chips since the bandwidth on one would mostly get consumed by the audio data and the overhead. 32 channels seems to be pushing the boundaries of a single chip. They seem geared toward laptop recording and in most cases managing to get more than one fw chip on the system would be a rarity.

Edit: The echo offerings only manage about 16x16 at the most anyway, so it makes a bit more sense to hang a second interface off the first.

Are you saying you think they require multiple Firewire controller cards? If so, no, sorry they do not. I have run up to 4 Echo Audiofire units off a single Cardbus Firewire port on a laptop. It was just an experiment, but I have run shows with 2 Audiofire 12s or an Audiofire 12 and 8. All you do is just daisy chain them together and plug them in all at once. Or boot the computer up after they have all turned on.

Of course Echo seems to do this better than anyone else for some reason. All I'm saying is that there is no reason Firewire shouldn't have been able to handle fairly high channel counts with just a bit more overhead than a PCI or PCIe card. It's just that not many manufacturers took the time to write drivers to do so. The bandwidth of Firewire should allow for several dozen channels actually. Not as many as a good PCIe card certainly, but still 24, 32 or more really shouldn't be a problem. It's just that someone has to have the drivers and hardware.

As for having multiple Firewire controllers on a single system, that is easy as well. I have it all the time on my laptop. There is the built in Firewire 4 pin and I have a cardbus controller that I pop in a well, which I only use because I don't trust the 4 pin connector, although it functions perfectly fine for the most part. With a desktop system you can easily drop in multiple firewire controller cards if you really wanted to do so.

I'm assuming a controller card is what you meant by Firewire chip?

[gdougherty]

Are you saying you think they require multiple Firewire controller cards? If so, no, sorry they do not. I have run up to 4 Echo Audiofire units off a single Cardbus Firewire port on a laptop. It was just an experiment, but I have run shows with 2 Audiofire 12s or an Audiofire 12 and 8. All you do is just daisy chain them together and plug them in all at once. Or boot the computer up after they have all turned on.

Of course Echo seems to do this better than anyone else for some reason. All I'm saying is that there is no reason Firewire shouldn't have been able to handle fairly high channel counts with just a bit more overhead than a PCI or PCIe card. It's just that not many manufacturers took the time to write drivers to do so. The bandwidth of Firewire should allow for several dozen channels actually. Not as many as a good PCIe card certainly, but still 24, 32 or more really shouldn't be a problem. It's just that someone has to have the drivers and hardware.

As for having multiple Firewire controllers on a single system, that is easy as well. I have it all the time on my laptop. There is the built in Firewire 4 pin and I have a cardbus controller that I pop in a well, which I only use because I don't trust the 4 pin connector, although it functions perfectly fine for the most part. With a desktop system you can easily drop in multiple firewire controller cards if you really wanted to do so.

I'm assuming a controller card is what you meant by Firewire chip?

I'm saying in the case of the MOTU, Profire, Focusrite solutions that offer 24/24 or even 28/28 in some cases, they're already pushing the bounds of realistic fw bandwidth once you figure in overhead, chipset performance and everything. At most you get 16x16 on an Audiofire 8 with ADAT expansion, so hanging 3-4 of those without any expanders off one chipset isn't a huge deal for a single fw channel. To do multiple of the larger channel count units, yes, I'd want to have a dedicated fw chip handling the bandwidth of each interface.

[RBIngraham]

I'm saying in the case of the MOTU, Profire, Focusrite solutions that offer 24/24 or even 28/28 in some cases, they're already pushing the bounds of realistic fw bandwidth once you figure in overhead, chipset performance and everything. At most you get 16x16 on an Audiofire 8 with ADAT expansion, so hanging 3-4 of those without any expanders off one chipset isn't a huge deal for a single fw channel. To do multiple of the larger channel count units, yes, I'd want to have a dedicated fw chip handling the bandwidth of each interface.


Well I guess I would just disagree. At least on paper there is nothing stopping a single Firewire I/O port from handling many channels of audio. I haven't done the math but I would suspect that 48 should really be no problem and it should really handle even more than that.

Of course the reality is that no one is really writing drivers to handle that many except maybe RME and Echo. And if you can make it work and keep it stable is another whole discussion.

So please take my comments here with a grain of salt because in reality your assessment is probably correct since none of the manufacturers ever really tried to fix this or make it happen.

And now there are better things on the way and of course we still have higher channel count solutions using card slots, even on laptops if you can afford a nice MADI system. So I realize this whole exchange is largely a moot point anyway. :)

[gdougherty]

In theory if bandwidth was bandwidth, yes. Problem is Firewire is a serial communications protocol and it was never intended for real time reliable transmission of audio. The more devices you hang on an interface, the less reliable it gets for realtime transmission as well. Only one device at a time can communicate and there are issues with priority along a chain of devices. The use of bidirectional data begins to heavily limit bandwidth as the overhead to manage and hand off control of the data flow begins to disrupt the transmission of data and add latency to the throughput.
Also, since there's no mechanism for requesting retransmissions, the performance becomes similar to what we see in SAC. If something's stepping on the data flow and it doesn't make it, you don't get it. There aren't any do-overs.

[beatpete]

Don't believe the focusrite or presonus units do either. Using multiple fw devices would probably require multiple fw chips since the bandwidth on one would mostly get consumed by the audio data and the overhead. 32 channels seems to be pushing the boundaries of a single chip. They seem geared toward laptop recording and in most cases managing to get more than one fw chip on the system would be a rarity.

Edit: The echo offerings only manage about 16x16 at the most anyway, so it makes a bit more sense to hang a second interface off the first.

Both the Focusrite Saffire line and Presonus Firestudio line allow aggregate units with there current drivers. Also the Steinberg (Yamaha) MR816s do as well.

[RBIngraham]

Both the Focusrite Saffire line and Presonus Firestudio line allow aggregate units with there current drivers. Also the Steinberg (Yamaha) MR816s do as well.

:)

Looks like it's mostly a M Audio thing. The 2626 is about the only interface they make that doesn't suck ass.

Of course I have heard plenty of negative about Focusrite's drivers as well and after my fun with both Yamaha DSP Factory sound cards (which were awesome except for the drivers) and then mLan (which just sucked big time) I wouldn't trust anything that requires a driver to work properly from Yamaha ever again.

[beatpete]

:)

Looks like it's mostly a M Audio thing. The 2626 is about the only interface they make that doesn't suck ass.

Of course I have heard plenty of negative about Focusrite's drivers as well and after my fun with both Yamaha DSP Factory sound cards (which were awesome except for the drivers) and then mLan (which just sucked big time) I wouldn't trust anything that requires a driver to work properly from Yamaha ever again.

I'm with you there, I had both DSP factory and a Mlan device, drivers were ALWAYS an issue. That said, my MR816X works very well, even with 2 daisy chained. I had a Focusrite Pro40 and the later drivers were fine on that as well, you just couldn't get anywhere near the latency of the Profire 2626 driver.