the wire thing isn't a problem for me. I find it conveniate. its easy
to hook and unhook.

I understand now that cardbus and pcmcia are two different things. but
why is it that I stick my RME cardbus card into my laptop's PCMCIA
slot? is a cardbus a type of pcmcia card?

what has more potential? if you wanted to design the most powerful
soundcard for a laptop would you choose firewire or cardbus? which
would give you the most power? isnt cardbus only 133mbps while
firewire 400mbps and firewire 2 800mbps?

what would you rather get if you could could forget about the wireing
issue and just concentrated on performance. the RME HDSP System or a
Motu Firewire soundcard? does the MOtu firewire soundcards have the
routing capabilities of the RME HDSP SYSTEM?

hope you can answer these questions =)

Sami

"Sami Wilf" wrote in message
om
the wire thing isn't a problem for me. I find it conveniate. its easy
to hook and unhook.

I understand now that cardbus and pcmcia are two different things. but
why is it that I stick my RME cardbus card into my laptop's PCMCIA
slot? is a cardbus a type of pcmcia card?

CardBus is a second-generation PCMCIA-type interface. I bet that unless its
old, your laptop doesn't have a PCMCIA slot, but instead has a CardBus slot.

what has more potential? if you wanted to design the most powerful
soundcard for a laptop would you choose firewire or cardbus?

CardBus gives max bandwidth but for most audio applications, either is fine.

which would give you the most power? isn't CardBus only 133mbps while
FireWire 400mbps and FireWire 2 800mbps?

You've got to watch your small and large b's. PCMCIA is based on PCI and
offers 132 MBps. The capital B means bytes. The firewire numbers are small
b - bits. There are 8 data bits in a byte. So 132 MBps is 1,056 Mbps.

what would you rather get if you could forget about the wiring
issue and just concentrated on performance. the RME HDSP System or a
Motu Firewire soundcard? does the MOtu firewire soundcards have the
routing capabilities of the RME HDSP SYSTEM?

Lets put it this way, any CardBus-only system is married to laptops for most
practical purposes, but a Firewire system can plug and play on either a
laptop or a desktop.

The good news is that there are both CardBus and PCI interfaces for the RME
option, but the RME PCI card costs about 10 times as much as a Firewire PCI
card, which many modern desktops don't need because they already have a
firewire interface built in.

Sami Wilf wrote:

I understand now that cardbus and pcmcia are two different things. but
why is it that I stick my RME cardbus card into my laptop's PCMCIA
slot? is a cardbus a type of pcmcia card?

The mobile card uses a proprietary firewire derivative from the Multiface
or Digiface to the PCMCIA slot of the laptop. I think the cardbus is just
RME's product name for the card. In any event, they're great. I run 24
tracks to my laptop in the field at 24 bit without a hiccup.

And lots of laptops support PCMCIA or RME wouldn't be selling it as their
only mobile solution -- and it's the best laptop solution on the market.

Tim

you couldn't plug your RME multiface or digiface directly into a
firewire input? it uses a firewire cable to go to the pci card..

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message ...


The good news is that there are both CardBus and PCI interfaces for the RME
option, but the RME PCI card costs about 10 times as much as a Firewire PCI
card, which many modern desktops don't need because they already have a
firewire interface built in.

What you do mean by that? your trying to say that for a firewire
soundcard solution you can use one box for either laptop or desktop as
to the RME you have to buy a card seperate for the laptop and desktop?

could you go directly from the Multiface to a firewire input? the
multiface has a firewire input jack on it... could drivers be made so
you wouldn't need a pci card with a firewire jack on it.. you could
use the firewire port you already have.

if you have a cardbus card, why buy the expensive RME pci solution
when you can get a cheap pci to cardbus card.

sami wilf

"Sami Wilf" wrote in message
om...
you couldn't plug your RME multiface or digiface directly into a
firewire input? it uses a firewire cable to go to the pci card..

This is from the RME website.

"The connection between CardBus card and I/O box is established using
ordinary firewire cable (closed LAN to IEEE 1394.) The data transfer does
not use Firewire protocol, but our own proprietary bus protocol."

So no, it won't work that way.

"Sami Wilf" wrote in message
om
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...


The good news is that there are both CardBus and PCI interfaces for
the RME option, but the RME PCI card costs about 10 times as much as
a Firewire PCI card, which many modern desktops don't need because
they already have a firewire interface built in.

What you do mean by that? your trying to say that for a firewire
soundcard solution you can use one box for either laptop or desktop as
to the RME you have to buy a card separate for the laptop and desktop?

Sounds about right.

could you go directly from the Multiface to a firewire input? the
multiface has a firewire input jack on it... could drivers be made so
you wouldn't need a pci card with a firewire jack on it.. you could
use the firewire port you already have.

An industry standard implementation of the Firewire jack on the Multiface
would just work that way.

if you have a cardbus card, why buy the expensive RME pci solution
when you can get a cheap pci to cardbus card.

Bingo!

In article writes:

I understand now that cardbus and pcmcia are two different things. but
why is it that I stick my RME cardbus card into my laptop's PCMCIA
slot? is a cardbus a type of pcmcia card?

Yes. In fact the industry tried to do away with the term PCMCIA (which
I believe stands for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms)
and wanted to call it PC Card. But I always thought that a PC card was
what we called those circuit boards with the etched traces stuck to
them.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Sami--

All of your questions can be answered by a visit to both the Motu and
RME websites. RME doesn't use standard firewire, because they've
built DSP technology into their cards (which their in/out boxes run
into/outof the computer from). This DSP handles some of the
processing load so the lagtime (latency) caused by the hardware is
lower than on other systems without DSP (ie. standard firewire cards).
Depending on your setup (ie computer/OS) the difference in latency
may or may not be noticeable.

Also the reason why you wouldn't want to use an adapter, is, well,
it's an adapter. I've actually looked into the option but it really
isn't one cause there seem to be a multitude of problems that people
have run into trying this with the RME cardbus card. Do a google
search on that topic.

Cost vs sound quality, as is the case with NEARLY everything in audio,
is why you wouldn't want to go the cheaper route many times. In RME's
case, you're paying more, but just do an A/B comparison based upon the
AD/DA converters alone and you'll see why it's more than most firewire
solutions.

I'm curious if anyone here's done much A/Bing between the RME and
Metric Halo Mobile I/Os (which might be a good solution for you Sami
if you don't want to get involved with different cards for different
computers).

Cheers!