Firewire to SPDIF

Arj,

I just did some poking around. The Compaq PCMCIA card may be an isue as well. I'm assuming device manager doesn't show any issues. I'm not familiar with the technology on the interface but I would speculate, perhaps, a better card may help? I'd hate to have you spend more money, but may be worth a shot. I am also thinking, with that great DAC of yours, you may not need the Monarchy? Or...are you using the dip to upsample? Maybe disengaging (upsampling)that as well-or just taking it out to listen? I only use the DIP cause my MF XDAC3 isn't very top of the line these days, while your DAC is pretty much state of the art. I use spdif - out from the DAC; I see you use the 110 ohm out. I'm searching for a PCMCIA card with a 4 pin out as well, whih would eliminate the power supply.

It just may be a bottleneck. let me try to borrow another card and give it a shot because i got worst results with the built in I-Link in my toshiba laptop

Arj & Cerrot -- Not sure if this is relevant, but I want to make you aware that firewire chips made by Via, which are widely used on many motherboards and cards that have firewire interfaces, have a long tradition of not working very well. TI (Texas Instruments) firewire chips are vastly preferable.

That is documented in many user posts you can find on the net, and I can tell you from personal experience that when doing digital video captures Via firewire chips drop frames at least every few minutes, while TI chips NEVER do, even in the same machine running the same programs. Although of course the data rates that involves are considerably higher than for audio.

You should be able to determine which chip you have by looking at the board or card, or possibly from the manufacturer's literature.

Hope that helps,
-- Al

Thanks, Al. Very good point. Another reason why I think Arj's interface is the issue. I have the TI chip and haven't had a dropout. I couldn't find much on the Compaq interface Arj is using.

Hi Al, Cerrot
2 days back i tried it with a Ornage link card which apparently uses an NEC shipset. cant really say it was better. my guess is Frewire cards+Laptop isnot good enough from an audio point of view..