Is this true ?

[ikke]

Is it true that Digidesign is developing a system somewhere between LE and TDM?

I heared this on a board from a person that had his info from another board, so Im guessing its nothing but a beautifull story

[Stiff]

I have no idea... but I can't see a reason to why they should.

[ikke]

Because I can buy a pci-card, then. I dont want no firewire. I was thinking on upgrading to a 002 but firewire kept me away from the 002.. I dont trust USB and firewire that much. I have problems enough with my current DIGI001.

[Captain_Pants]

really? Why dont you trust USB or Firewire? USB has been very reliable for me for a long time. My MIDI equipment runs on USB, my keyboard and mouse do, my network does, my media reader/writer runs on USB. Never any problems. Just curious why you dont like it?
IVe never had probs with it.
No expirience with firewire though.

[Rabidium]

Yeah, usb at least is vastly more 'reliable' than PCI... seems strange to shun that at least... And what could possibly fill the gap is just a PCI 002 then. Though it sounds like maybe it wasn't the most reliable information you were acting on.
-Olaf

[tele_player]

Not trusting USB and Firewire doesn't really make sense. I don't expect we'll see any more PCI audio cards for PTLE.

You are missing out if that's keeping you way from an 002 or 002R.

Because I can buy a pci-card, then. I dont want no firewire. I was thinking on upgrading to a 002 but firewire kept me away from the 002.. I dont trust USB and firewire that much. I have problems enough with my current DIGI001.

[ikke]

Ok. So why are the HD systems all pci? and not firewire or USB? Is this because they need the card to put in DSP chips?

[SSRJazz]

Because I can buy a pci-card, then. I dont want no firewire. I was thinking on upgrading to a 002 but firewire kept me away from the 002.. I dont trust USB and firewire that much. I have problems enough with my current DIGI001.

Most Digi001 problems I've seen is because of incorrect setup/trying to do too much on the computer.

These things are really designed to be on standalone machines that aren't used for general gameplaying/web browsing. The more you do with/put in a computer, the more likely the chance that you'll get some conflict and -something- won't work correctly. This is especially true on the PC side of things because of such varied hardware and manufacturers of said hardware.

As for not trusting firewire, just about the entire A/V industry has relied on Firewire for YEARS now and is THE digital video transfer standard. The consumer electronics industry is finally catching up now and is why you see firewire on just about any digital video camera now. Firewire has 'been there and done that'...it's a very mature and reliable platform and continues to improve. I can't think of a buss you could trust more than firewire for both consumer and pro a/v applications.

I can see why you wouldn't want to trust USB 1.x...it was slow and young. USB 2.x is more mature, way faster and works quite well.

Anything is possible...but....given a properly set up and configured system with approved hardware and software, and ONLY using it for ProTools, it should be QUITE stable and reliable...firewire, usb, or no.

[Matt Whritenour]

Ok. So why are the HD systems all pci? and not firewire or USB? Is this because they need the card to put in DSP chips?

yes because of the DSP chips and i am not possitive but i think that
HD stuff uses scsi.... but if i'm wrong someone will correct me

[SSRJazz]

Basically,

The HD systems require more buss bandwidth that is currently available via USB or Firewire.

Firewire does 400 (800 now?) Mbps (megabits per second)
USB 2.0 does about 480 and so.

The PCI buss does 133 MBps (megaBYTES per second)

1 byte = 8 bits

so:

400,000,000 bits/sec / 8 bits/byte = 50,000,000 bytes/sec = 50MBps (megabytes)


PCI obviously has more bandwidth available for slinging all that data around to the different DSP chips across different cards that have different plugins going on them, etc.

PCI-X is going to be obscenely faster than that.

Firewire 800 is getting closer to PCI, but I'm not sure I'd want to use it to throw all that data around with just yet.

What with sampling rates and bit rates going up and up....I'm not sure we'll see a FireWire HD system in the immediate future...but I'll bet you dimes to doughnuts that Digi has been looking VERY closely at it.

With the LE systems (digi002/mbox/etc) they don't need all that extra buss bandwidth because all they are doing is doing A/D conversion and data transfer to/from the breakout box inputs and outputs...all the data processing is going on locally to the computer itself. Not so on the HD system.

I would imagine that, at the time they had to make the decision, Digi saw that USB wasn't ready yet, and if you said "firewire" to a PC user, they'd have NO idea what you're talking about. Now, firewire has made a lot of inroads to pc's (mainly because of digital video cameras...and more A/V work being done on PC's as opposed to mac's) that they could use FireWire for the digi002/r