Best FireWire Interface for Laptop?

Hi,

I have a new Dell Inspiron laptop running XP. I own Reaktor, Absynth, and Kontakt, and my main goal is to to use the laptop as a multichannel sampler playback engine under Kontakt. Ideally, my Mac will send MIDI to the laptop, and Kontakt will deliver sound via two banks of ADAT lightpipe and / or eight to sixteen channels of analog output.

At a minimum (and this is probably most realistic, budget-wise, for me), the FireWire interface will deliver MIDI, a bank of ADAT and a bank of analog, or maybe just two banks of ADAT.

Anyway, what I'm wondering is, what's the best FireWire hardware interface that will work in this scenario? My needs are pretty simple - the laptop will never be used as a recorder, just a sample / synth playback engine running NI tools.

Any advice you can give me is appreciated. Ideally, I'll just plug the FireWire interface in and see all those NI channels magically match up with the FireWire outputs, I'll have MIDI, and I'll be able to get to work immediately without going into some PC purgatory.

Peace

Mike Scheibinger

 

It's not firewire, but if you can use a cardbus/pcmcia solution, the RME multiface is really nice. One of the few techy things in the music world that works pretty much as it's supposed to, has regular updates, has company designers who really know the guts of their stuff sitting on their newsgroup and answering questions regularly... I could go on... it works (really well) for me.

 

I'm a big fan of the Metric Halo Mobile I/O (mhlabs.com) but it's not PC compatible yet.

One of the best ones that fits the description you list would be the MOTU 828 mkII (motu.com).

 

I'm looking to do the exactly the same thing with my Sony Vaio laptop. Anybody using the M-Audio Firewire 410 audio interface?That looks really nice.

Tom

 

To anyone considering M-Audio equipment may I suggest checking out www.zzounds.com (the big mail order company whose name appears at the top of most searches) and reviewing their customer feedback sheets. M-Audio has the worst customer satisfaction that I have seen of any manufacturer of any product. I was recently considering firewire/PCI cards and was attracted to their low pricing, but changed my mind after doing a little research. Apparently, they have left many customers frustrated.
I decided to get an Echo PCI card ( I think it's called Echo-24) at the suggestion of bduffy on this site and have been very satisfied with this product.

 

i would second the concerns about m-audio gear. my experience with the quattro was pretty bad, and the people i've talked to like store employees say they get more m-audio returns than anything else.

pdgood - do you have any problems with the audio cutting out when using your echo layla with kontakt while adjusting the kontakt gui? whenever i scroll up or down or open an instrument to access the knobs, the sound glitches. it shouldn't i don't think, and this was actually NOT a problem with the quattro???

 

I have the Echo 24, not the Layla, so I'm not sure if this helps, but I'm not getting any glitches. So far, however I am using the card on a limited basis as not all of my gear works through a card. (the wave form editor does not, for example.) Mostly I just use it for input and playback, not much in monitoring.

 

Hi, I'm using the FW410, and have been for just over a year now. I haven't used it all that extensively, but I have used it for recording 4 simulateous live inputs via Logic 6.3.1 for over 2 hours non stop with no problems. I had problems with a few bugs initially but M-AUDIO corrected that with the fixes available or downloading soon after I discovered them. The mixer that comes with the device is pretty cool too with numeous routing possiblities. I think it serves well for my needs (G4 Powerbook). I would recommend it to anyone considering purchasing a good value for money, and practical firewire interface. Firewire is much better than USB (not gonna go into why - other people may have differing opinions though).

Best Regards

 

today I brought my M-audio Firewire Audiophile back to trade it in for a Edirol FA-101. The M-audio was giving me problems with ground-hum using it with my Dell Inspiron notebook (hum dissapeared when disconnecting the Dell's psu). Since the m-audio has only unbalanced analog i/o I figured it would be better to have an audio-interface with balanced i/o. The FA-101 installed with no problems and gives me (as far as I could tell, I'm not exactly an audiophile myself) good, clean audio. It has 8 analog ins and 8 analog outs and optical SPDIF i/o + MIDI i/o, all this over firewire. I think I'm pretty futureproof for the things I'm doing and will be doing .

The FA-101 is about double the price of an Firewire Audiophile here in the Netherlands, but you get a lot more for the extra money.

Diego