On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 07:03:07 -0500, Paul Davis wrote: > you need to understand that this state of affairs is caused by > misleading advertising and marketing. firewire cards cost $50 and can
Actually, in europe at least firewire cards are < $20. The abundance of DV camcorders has pushed the price down. > as a result, the "firewire" cards you are seeing are actually > proprietary uses of an extraordinarily cheap technology. the MOTU > stuff is one example, the RME HDSP series is another. there is no deep > technical reason why these devices could not have been implemented as > external devices that send data to a generic 1394 card, handled by a > generic 1394/audio driver. but this would require an agreed upon > protocol, and would make it clear that the cost of these devices is > too high by a factor of 2-5. consequently, we are currently stuck with > these so-called "firewire" interfaces in which the fact that they use > 1394 is about as relevant as the color of the packing they use. I was under the impression that the HDSP used the firewire physical layer, but not the signalling technology, but I could be wrong about that, you'd be the person to know I guess... The other 1394 devices do at least work with generic cards, even if they dont use a standard protocol. - Steve
