Chiming in on the 'cheap-usb-audio-interface' conversation

[Thomas Orgis]

Am Sat, 8 Jan 2011 11:34:59 -0500
schrieb Mike Holstein <mikeh789 at gmail.com>: 

> in my experience, USB devices can sometimes
> pick up as much electrical interference as internal sound cards on laptops.

I have to spoil the specific take on USB interfaces: "Hey, I hear it when you move the mouse!" That's what I got with someone listening with headphones to the main output of my Edirol FA-101. I'm glad that you don't get that on the recordings (I _think_), just superimposed on the analog output portion.
But still, I am mightily pi**ed about the lack of protection from such issues (our dear friend Improper Grounding again, I guess) even when shelling out several 100 € for the gear.

Be it USB or any other digital interface, I guess you can have luck and the bad sort of which. I do not see a technical argument why a USB-connected device should suffer more than a device connected via FireWire (both being bus-powered, even) ... you can get bitten on both camps. For simple recording tasks, I really like the io|2 -- no comparison in bitchyness to the FireWire setup. I ended up angrily smashing a dual socket mainboard with a hammer because it featured a southbridge bug that just so might be the reason for reliable FireWire audio being impossible -- even using a PCI controller with a "good" FireWire chip. I strongly suspect that a USB interface would have worked just fine. Perhaps not ultra sharp latency, but without all the fuss.

That being said, by current setup with ubuntu studio 10.04 and the FA-101 on a custom PC worked without major hickup the last few weeks ... but I very well remember having to reboot the machine (or at least modprobe-cycle firewire) because the firewire subsystem got stuck because of just another subtle driver issue. The FA-101 is a rather old device, but still tricky. No comparison to just having snd-usb-audio loaded and off we go -- with the added plus that it works without JACK, too. To be fair: USB interfaces may not like being put behind a hub... so they're not _totally_ trivial;-)


Alrighty then,

Thomas.

PS: To be a bit more on topic again; I did not test the MIDI performance of any of my USB or FireWire interfaces (uh, would that work with the FA-101?). I am using an Alesis ControlPad with in-built USB for triggering drums via MIDI ... but I don't play seriously enough on that one to judge.
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