G5 Firewire-ports poor for audio interfaces??

Interesting observation as I have been wondering about this however in regards to audio and isight camera's. I was using my kids new iMac G5 yesterday to chat with overseas family and found that they could hear audio from the iMac better than when I use my Dual 2ghz PM with iSight.

Well that kinda makes no sense lol, a) i run Digi 002R, with new PTLE7, it runs amazing, its pure power, i have never


But if your 002r is disconnecting alot, its nothing but your 002R, search up Power Harness problem on duc.digidesign.com , its a huge problem that alot of Rack units have had, where the power harness just clicks and doesnt work, just call digidesign and they will swap it for you, i had a defective one too, they knew about the problem already as thousands have had it , so they swap it up, other than that, my results using my new Dual core 2.0 ghz Power Mac, i get 32+67 tracks on pro tools, comparing to just 32 tracks before. Which is amazing.

All the Firewire Ports on the G5 share the same bus. All the USB ports on the G5 share the same bus (separate buses for Firewire & USB). When using to devices on the same bus you may be getting conflicts. This happens quite a bit with video editing keeping both a deck and hard drives on the same bus frequently doesn’t work. Quickest fix is to just install a separate PCI card with the necessary ports. The PCI card will have a separate bus to the processor. If that is the problem of course!

Mike

I like the idea of trying a firewire card to see if it improves the connection. Also another cable, if you haven't already. None of my old PCI cards would fit in my G5. Makes shopping for them a bit of a pain.

If memory serves, the original specification for Firewire is a maximum length cable of 4.5 meters. According to everything I found at B&H, they now say 30' or roughly double the original 4.5 meters. In any event, even the 4.5 meters is plenty of length. To achieve longer lengths would require a repeater (amplifier) or a hub with a repeater built in. A simple hub would not act as a repeater.

Mike

I recently switched from a MOTU 828 running off the FW400 connector on the back of my G5 to a Yamaha mLan-based solution.

When I switched to mLan, admittedly running potentially tons more channels in/out, the internal FW bus "fell over" (connector on the front and the 400 and 800 connectors are all on the same bus no matter it turns out).

I popped a PCI firewire card and the audio stuff worked MUCH better, it was immediate. That's not to say that things work perfectly now... if the machine has been in sleep mode for a while, mLan's autoconnector hangs quite severely, whereby it's not even possible to force quit it... really ugly actually.

at any rate... for 8 in/out, certainly on MOTU, the on-board FW will "do", but it's probably best to get another FW card, especially if you're going to put sample libraries etc on an external FW drive, then you'd want that to be separate from the audio streams...

hope this helps!

Michael

g5.2x2.0 Mac OS X (10.4.3)