M-Audio and Tiger, Computer Hardware Options

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M-Audio and Tiger

[Ideasite]

I have a Firewire 410 and I can tell you that M-Audio does not write good driver code. The device will somehow loose it's connection to they system when there is any other firewire activity. This means that they have not written the driver to standard firewire specs. This is not a bandwidth issue because it happens when other firewire devices are connected to a completely separate firewire port on a firewire card -- not just another firewire port.

Also, firewire has more than enough bendwidth for both audio and other firewire bus activity. As their badly written driver is loosing its connection to the device, it introduces extremely damaging pops into the audio stream. I have had to add a foot power switch just to protect my equipment.

The driver also requires that the system be completely shut off - not just restarted. There is no technical reason for this, other than poor code in the driver. In unix, any process can be restarted on the fly, including core audio and the firewire driver. Due to errors in the driver, firewire bus power must be cycled to the Firewire 410 to re-boot it's internal code before it will re-connect to the CPU.

In addition, changes to the volume using the keyboard take about 3 seconds per level to happen. What on Earth, other than bad code, should cause this kind of delay on a G5 2.5 mHz machine with 8 gig of RAM?

This is inexcusibly dumb and downright dangerous. M-Audio states that no manufacturer can predict what new versions of operating systems will require, but any manufacturer can get the specs for the Mac OS, core audio and firewire, without a large investment, and write suitable driver code. M-Audio has simply failed in this regard.

The Firewire 410, and the rest of the drivers should stay connected, allow hot swapping of devices, not introduce unecessary pops in the audio stream. M-Audio is letting us all down if they can't achieve this simple set of goals for their products.