Thread The issue of firewire incompatibility

4 replies
2 participants
754 views
2 followers

Mosvalve

New AFfiliate

First post

1 Posted on 03/22/2016 at 18:16:36

I am curious as to what is actually incompatible with what, the firewire card and motherboard or the firewire card and the interface that is connected. I have a situation with two identical pc's with identical firewire cards but different interfaces.
The interfaces are a Focusrite Saffire pro 40 and a Saffire pro 24 and Mixcontrol 3.4. Mixcontrol 3.7 was tested also and made no difference. The firewire cards are Vantec cards with a VIA chipset. In my old PC (HP) I used a SIIG card with a TI chipset and it works perfectly with my Pro 24 but does not work with my interface in my new PC so I picked up the Vantec in hopes it will work and it works perfectly in the new PC.
However the pro 40 does not work with the Vantec card in either PC. I did not test it with the SIIG yet though. I was wondering if anyone knows for sure if it's the interface that needs to play well with the card and not necessarily the card and the motherboard?
Sonar Platinum is not a factor here as it does not have to be launched for Mixcontrol to fail. For a sort explination of what is wrong. Mixcontrol does not communicate with the interface. I will get more detailed if need be.
PC specs: ASUS H170M Plus System board Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @3.20GHz 16GB Ram Windows 7 Pro

Watch by email

Simon Focusrite

AFfinity Poster

2 Posted on 03/23/2016 at 06:12:00

Good afternoon,

This is something that we investigated for a while, and ultimately found that some Firewire cards were experiencing problems with some motherboards when Windows 10 was introduced into the equation (after previously working with Windows 7).
There are obviously a number of different variables here, and as because of the nature of PC hardware (so many combinations of different manufacturers that can cause compatibility issues), testing quickly became difficult.
We have written a short article on our findings here, perhaps it can shed some light on the subject further for you:

https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207546925

Best regards
Simon // Focusrite Technical Support

Mosvalve

New AFfiliate

3 Posted on 03/26/2016 at 20:50:37

An FYI for anyone having Firewire incompatibility issues. It turns out the Pro 40 will only work with the Vantec VIA chipset using the legacy drive. The Pro 24 works fine with either driver. You gotta love computers.

Simon Focusrite

AFfinity Poster

4 Posted on 03/30/2016 at 07:12:45

To be clear with the above post, the Saffire Pro40 won't ONLY work with that particular Vantec card, what the member means is that if you have that Vantec Firewire card, it seems that the legacy Firewire driver needs to be active (we have not tested this particular card).
Please note that Windows 10 does not include the legacy firewire driver, Microsoft also omitted it from Windows 8, however released a hotfix for Windows 8/8.1.

I hope the above helps
Simon // Focusrite Technical Support

Mosvalve

New AFfiliate

5 Posted on 03/30/2016 at 12:35:32

Simon, You are correct, thanks for that clarification.

List of moderators