Originally posted by TomcatMF
The digi 002 rack is not PCI based. It uses a fire wire interface. Are there a lot of latency problems with this type of interface. I'm intrested in the 002 rack because of the fire wire. This way I don't have to take apart my computer to install it, and it will avoid conflicts with my sound card. |
I've been using the 002 rack with both the bundled ProTools software and Sonar and a high-end Dell laptop running Windows XP. I haven't noticed significant latency or other performance issues in either case.
Firewire is a fast interface and on a PC it isn't usually overloaded with traffic from other peripherals. You can tune the operating system to minimize latency and drop out issues, but doing so is a bit of a black art. There was a good article on the subject a month or three ago in Electronic Musician.
Of course, you need good laptop hardware to begin with. I wouldn't attempt 8 track recording without a reasonably fast disk and at least half a gigabyte of RAM. Processor speed isn't that critical for recording, but for playback/mixing, a 2GHz or faster processor is a must.
I have two boot configurations for my laptop - one for work use and the other for music. The music configuration disables a lot of stuff including the network, power management, and most background services. I've been able to record 8 24-bit tracks at 44.1 KHz with very few problems. Playback/mixing performance has also been good as long as I don't pile on too many real-time effects.
In short, I'm a satisfied customer.
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Stephen Burd
Albuquerque, NM
Help Desk