The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Firewire chipsets and music production ( not again :)

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by AchternStyg, Jun 25, 2007.

  1. AchternStyg

    AchternStyg Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    22
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    This thread is meant to gather knowledge about the combination of Dell laptops and firewire audio-cards, in particular M-audio on Ricoh chips.

    -------------

    Hei, everyone. I decided to start this thread after months of time waisting on reading forums, fiddling with hardware and coming up with explanations.
    Several issues to be addressed:
    1) Are Ricoh chipsets ( the ones in most of the recent DELL laptops ) fine for music production? MORE SPECIFIC: Are firewire external soundcards fine with Ricoh chipsets?

    2) Particular case: ( mine) : Dell 6400 with T5200 processor, 2 GB Ram, windows XP SP2.
    Using M-Audio Firewire Audiophile in combination with Ableton Live 6, through the native firewire port on my laptop. Everything works great for most of the time.
    3-4 times a day, the card suddenly is in a weird state, where playback is fine but no signal comes in through input 1/2 and through the midi in channel. Also, direct monitoring on/off button, software driven, does not respond anymore and neither do the volume buttons, also soft driven. This indicated a bug either in Ableton or in the m-audio driver. By closing Ableton, the card comes back to fully responsive state. But also playing with the InputSettings in Ableton would fix the sound card as well. I dont want to believe this has to do with the Ricoh chipset. I have to admit that the problem occurs less when I disable the Express port in the hardware profiles ( this is also driven by the Ricoh chip) or the net-adapter over the firewire port.

    Now, it took me quite some time and reading to fix up my laptop so it can run 96 kHz/24 bit firewire, play 20 stereo tracks and at the same time record another stereo track on top of that. I had to convince Dell to replace my DVD drive, which they did, I had to read up on IRQ's, etc. Everything is perfect except for those 3 times a day when I loose inputs and midi and often is during a recording. The DPC latency checker does not show me any spikes. I tried several versions of Ableton 6.
    So, let me know what you found out about this.

    Cheers,

    Achtern Styg ( www.myspace.com/AchternStyg )
     
    AchternStyg, Jun 25, 2007
    #1