Fireface 400 leopard driver problems ?

Yep. I just wasted a month trying to get a FF400 working on my iMac before I returned the FF.

Have a look at the RME website forum. You will see that there is a known problem between FF400 and ALL aluminum iMacs (?!?!). You will see that this problem has existed for over a year (?!?!)
And you will see that RME is taking a hard line and saying that this is an iMac problem. (This might be correct, but IMO it is suicidal.)

According to RME, Apple changed FireWire chips from TI (good) to Agere (bad), and this broke the FF400-iMac connection. According to RME, the Agere FW chip does not meet the 1394a spec, and
this is the cause. Now, maybe this is true, or maybe the problem is in the FF driver. I don't think it matters. Every newer iMac and most PC FW cards which plug into the PCIe bus use the Agere chip, so there are millions of existing interfaces out there (including yours and mine).

Also according to RME, they have duplicated the problem with a MOTU interface, which they present as justification that the problem is with Apple/Agere.

Finally, according to RME, there is a "work around", which involves either using the FW800 port or daisy-chaining from another FW400 device already connected. If you look around, some people claim this works, and others claim it does not. In my case I decided that I didn't want to screw around with a "work around" on a brand new $1300 device. I bailed to an Apogee, which has worked seamlessly, and took 10 minutes to set up (I'm a slow reader).

Oh, and the FF400 wouldn't work on my Vista box, either (FW400 card plugged into PCIe).

It is pretty obvious to me that RME needs to change their driver. In the meantime, customers are getting screwed.

old Bill

Yes, it's too bad Apple went with the cheaper firewire chip on some computers. There is nothing wrong with the RME Fireface 400 or 800. I'm using the FF400 on my 8 core Mac pro and everything
works fine. I have the Texas Instruments firewire chipset as opposed to the Agere chipset. TI =Good
Agere =Bad. If you have Windows Xp on your mac you can boot into it and check your firewire chipset from device manager. The Mac System Profiler doesn't tell you which chip you have.

Apple wants you to use the best possible memory chips, but then they go and throw in a cheap FW chipset to save money. It's pretty crazy considering Apple invented Firewire.

RealDave

I just wanted to chime in and say that using a Firewire 800>400 cable will allow your Fireface400 to communicate with your alum. But there is the occasional audio drop out or glitch. So it's not really a 100% working solution just yet.

My Fireface 400 works on my old G4 and I've also tested it working on PC desktop and laptop so the problem is def. with the Agere firewire.

What a nightmare! So if I get FF800 it will work? Also I don't really get the work around? So you are saying if I use a FF800 cable it will kind of work? That makes no sense to me? I tried using other firewire cables and it didn't help? It's hard for me to see what special properties the ff800 cable could have to fix this... that said I'd sure like to try the fix? Is there somewhere I can but just the cable or do I have to buy the FF800 to get it?

same here, I have been using FF400 on a Dual G5 PPC fine, just bought iMac 24 (seduced by a great display) and FF was fine in stand alone mode but wouldn't work in Logic 8 or even itunes.
i just daisy chained firewire from Powercore and at least itunes works, any more news on this? i just mailed RME (ha!)