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One major thing not mentioned is that apprently not everyone bothered implementing FireWire the same. I never learned the technical reason, but if you bought ce
by dcosson 9y ago
One major thing not mentioned is that apprently not everyone bothered implementing FireWire the same. I never learned the technical reason, but if you bought certain digital audio recording interfaces circa 2007, you learned in the fine print/after you called customer service that it only worked with TI FireWire ports . These were the ones used on Macs at this point, I had a dell laptop which used a cheaper manufacturer so (perhaps combined with the fact that my recording interface itself was not a high end one and maybe cut some corners on its end too) the audio recording quality was staticy and uneven. I ended up having to return it and get a lower-bandwidth, noticeably higher latency USB powered one because at least USB ports were consistent.
I was always curious if some manufacturers were not implementing the full spec here (maybe because by this time according to the article FireWire was already on its last legs), or if this was due to flaws in the spec that left certain things optional or something and that ruined interoperability.
- Dylan16807 9y agoThe more things change... Note the recent problems where the Macbook Pro refuses to use Thunderbolt 3 devices with a TPS65982 chipset, and requires TI's TPS65983 chipset.
- NSAID 9y agoWow, I had forgotten about that. I never understood what the cause of this issue was either, but it sure took up a lot of my time.
- wtallis 9y agoIt shouldn't really surprise anyone that a cheaper VIA host interface chip would have worse performance or compatibility than a more expensive TI or Agere/LSI chip. The VIA chips were sufficient for connecting an external hard drive, and that made them sufficient for checking a box on the laptop's spec sheet. You didn't run into trouble with USB because by that time all your USB ports were coming straight from the Intel southbridge. Even if Intel's host controller implementation had issues, it would have been the device maker's problem to work around them since Intel's market share was so large. No modern peripheral interconnect is simple enough for host interfaces to be judged on a mere pass/fail basis. The cheap chips almost always find a way to suck, whether it's obscure like FireWire or ubiquitous like gigabit Ethernet.
- ukyrgf 9y agoI don't miss those days at all. I chose to build a fairly expensive setup ~10 years ago that is now completely obsolete. I'd have to build a 32-bit Windows XP machine to get it to even work. It got replaced by maybe $400 in USB devices and they'll power up on any computer I plug it into.
- eropple 9y agoYeah - the future's pretty awesome. I can run a three-camera live studio with six microphones off a laptop these days (for Internet streaming; higher quality obviously requires a little more work).