>In the long run though I think firewire is the correct solution, but >only when directly attaching the outboard hardware to the PC. That's >where I think RME really screwed everyone over, by using "1394" cables >and connectors and such, but not making it actual firewire. ~$300 for >an interface board that should cost $20 is hard to swallow for me.
the "interface" board has a Xilinx FPGA that is doing, by my understanding, a *lot* more than just handling ieee1394 data i/o in the sense that a generic ieee1394 interface would. i will admit that is not entirely clear that this is the case, but i believe all the smarts on the H-DSP reside on the interface card, not in the "breakout box". whether this is a good idea or not is clearly debatable, and i admit, i would have preferred a solution that just delivered ieee1394+some documented open audio+MIDI protocol to a generic ieee1394 interface. i'm not going to scream that loudly though :) >Designing viable firewire-based audio I/O is one my back-burner >projects. its been done. i had an NDA from Digital Harmony to write the driver for their firewire-based interface, and then they went belly up. the business side of firewire audio is much more challenging right now than the technical side. --p
