High end audio interface

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sjzstudio
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Re: High end audio interface

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RockMaster
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by RockMaster »

merlyn wrote: Mon May 16, 2022 12:56 pm There's a thread where someone got an RME Fireface UCX II working :

viewtopic.php?p=139025#p139025

It has a class compliant mode, which we can thank Apple and the iPad for, rather than RME being particularly sympathetic to Linux. The Fireface UCX II has a different design from most interfaces. Everything can be controlled from the front panel. Usually even if an interface with built-in DSP like this worked in class compliant mode functionality would be lost because DSP is normally controlled from TotalMixFX. With the UCX II there is the option of hardware control, even if that is a bit more hassle.

RME PCI and PCIe cards are also known to work.

If you simply want balanced line-ins there are Digigram and Audioscience PCIe cards aimed at the broadcast industry. Very high end, with a price to match.
But in this thread you've linked it says that in class compliant mode there's higher latency compared to their proprietary Windows driver. That's very disappointing.
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

RockMaster wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 8:22 am But in this thread you've linked it says that in class compliant mode there's higher latency compared to their proprietary Windows driver. That's very disappointing.
I don't think it's surprising - be it disappointing - that optimized drivers (for Windows or Linux) work better than general ones (class compliance).
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by scott.thomason »

RockMaster wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 8:22 am But in this thread you've linked it says that in class compliant mode there's higher latency compared to their proprietary Windows driver. That's very disappointing.
How high is "higher"? Most recent processors will run a driver sufficiently fast. Even if the latency is higher, that doesn't mean it's too high to use.
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RockMaster
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by RockMaster »

scott.thomason wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:03 am
RockMaster wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 8:22 am But in this thread you've linked it says that in class compliant mode there's higher latency compared to their proprietary Windows driver. That's very disappointing.
How high is "higher"? Most recent processors will run a driver sufficiently fast. Even if the latency is higher, that doesn't mean it's too high to use.
I think it's about 5ms higher.
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Re: High end audio interface

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RockMaster wrote: Wed Oct 05, 2022 8:22 am But in this thread you've linked it says that in class compliant mode there's higher latency compared to their proprietary Windows driver. That's very disappointing.
More correctly there's a link to a Youtube video that deals with this issue. Honestly I couldn't care less what's happening with RME on WIndows or Mac.

If you can find a video dealing with the UCXII on Linux, that would be more relevant. In class compliant mode on Linux the UCXII will use ALSA drivers and the latency of ALSA USB drivers was recently improved. I'd like to see the numbers on Linux, not a video from a Windows jockey. :D

There are reasons to use an RME interface other than latency. They're solid, reliable and have good quality, quiet analogue electronics.
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Re: High end audio interface

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There are reasons to use an RME interface other than latency. They're solid, reliable and have good quality, quiet analogue electronics.
This is absolutely true.

In addition, studio work often requires several channels to be available at the same time. For example, drum recordings take up more than ten channels.

In addition, it would be good to have a graphical user interface to control the device's mixer.

That's why, at least for me, it would be almost necessary to get better integration with the RME Fireface UFX+ and 802.
At home, I do great with Behringer's U-phoria UMC202HD, but in a recording situation in the studio, I need a lot of high-quality inputs. That's why I have to hang partly on WIndows, which is pretty disgusting.

You can go there and hope for something better. But can they hear your voice. https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=27309
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Re: High end audio interface

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sjzstudio wrote: Fri Oct 07, 2022 2:05 pm
There are reasons to use an RME interface other than latency. They're solid, reliable and have good quality, quiet analogue electronics.
This is absolutely true.

In addition, studio work often requires several channels to be available at the same time. For example, drum recordings take up more than ten channels.

In addition, it would be good to have a graphical user interface to control the device's mixer.

That's why, at least for me, it would be almost necessary to get better integration with the RME Fireface UFX+ and 802.
At home, I do great with Behringer's U-phoria UMC202HD, but in a recording situation in the studio, I need a lot of high-quality inputs. That's why I have to hang partly on WIndows, which is pretty disgusting.

You can go there and hope for something better. But can they hear your voice. https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=27309
RME claims you can fully control their devices without the software. This is what caught my eye. You said in the studio you're forced to use the software, but technically, would you be able to do everything you need on the interface itself, no matter how slow and fiddly that would be?
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Re: High end audio interface

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RME claims you can fully control their devices without the software. This is what caught my eye. You said in the studio you're forced to use the software, but technically, would you be able to do everything you need on the interface itself, no matter how slow and fiddly that would be?
So it's like choosing between plague and cholera, Windows or controlling the device with four buttons. And the customer pays for the time that is wasted.

EDIT:

"Hell is a place where everything you want is right at your fingertips. You just never get to those things and you have to live with it, forever." :lol:
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Re: High end audio interface

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The Curious Tale of Latency, The German Engineers and The Xilinx Spartan.

If you don't know what a Xilinx Spartan is, it's a field programmable gate array or FPGA. Using FPGAs in their audio interfaces, rather than a dedicated sound chip, was an early decision taken by RME that has contributed to what the company is today. I have an RME HDSP 9632 in this machine, and I know it uses a Xilinx Spartan because I saw that chip on the card when I installed it. You could think about an FPGA as a general purpose matrix of logic gates that are programmed to provide the desired functionality.

Strangely, given RME's mystic latency aura, using an FPGA is the slower way to do it. I notice in the linked video discussed above, our host brims over with excitement when talking about RME proprietary drivers. In our host's world, proprietary drivers are good. The more ™s, ®s and ©s littered about the place the better, right? Well, not for me. I am wary of those symbols.

Because a dedicated sound chip only does one thing, it is inherently faster at that one thing. RME's move paid off because the bottleneck was not the sound chip -- it was the drivers, or what passed for drivers in Windows land at that time. I tend to think RME's drivers are, and I quote, "legendary" amongst Windows users because RME write actual drivers while the other manufacturers try to, but don't quite pull it off.

Why did RME choose an FPGA, though? Well, Ralf Männel and Matthias Carstens, the German engineers of this story, had a problem to solve, and that problem was ... latency. Like many engineering solutions the answer was to accept the underlying problem (it was unsolvable), and find a workaround. This was back in the late 90s, before Digidesign became Avid, and Protools was still a half hardware/half software solution. Latency was just too high to monitor through the computer while having a few plugins on tracks.

The solution was to leave the computer audio at a higher latency and monitor through a digital mixer implemented on the FPGA. The mixer uses 40 bit internal precision so that all the channels can be going at full tilt at the same time, and still not overload the internal bus. 40 bits? Are you crazy? Nope, it needed 40 bits, and it got 40 bits.

Unfortunately for us it doesn't look much like a mixer. There's not a knob or fader in sight.

Image

This is where TotalMix appears on the scene. TotalMix provides a way to control the hardware digital mixer built in to RME interfaces. TotalMix is not a software mixer -- it's a control panel for the hardware mixer implemented as DSP code on the FPGA.

If you have an RME PCI or PCIe card, there is a Linux equivalent of TotalMix available -- it's called hdspmixer.

Image

Note that this is the Linux equivalent of TotalMix, not TotalMixFX. On an HDSP9632, which is still manufactured twenty years later, there is no DSP compression or reverb, and TotalMix is there to provide virtual faders on a digital mixer.

For me RME was the budget option. A 9632 was £50 on ebay. Because PCI is becoming less common on motherboards, we are now in the situation where a second-hand 9632 is cheaper than the balanced, analogue breakout cable (~£60) that is required to have balanced (XLR) ins and outs. I already had a box that has four PCI slots in it, connected by a cable into a PCIe slot, so this was easy for me. If you want to try and get a PCI card working with a PCIe slot, careful research is required, particularly of the physical dimensions. Second-hand PCIe cards haven't gotten as low as £50 yet and they're quite rare on ebay. People who buy them appear to hang on to them.

I hardly use hdspmixer because I can have the latency low enough to monitor through the computer. TotalMix is a solution from twenty years ago to the problem of latency, which was to accept latency and monitor through a different path. However if you're familiar with TotalMix, like @sjzstudio, and want to work that way, I think that's fine.

Now some manufacturers use the absence of a mixer as a selling point like the Presonus Quantum. Fast, eh? Blink and you'll miss it. Low latency might be more accurate. In 2022 it is possible to monitor through the computer, meaning that a mixer built into an interface is less essential.

But still we hear about the amazing RME proprietary drivers, and I think this is to do with the fact that USB is not really a pro audio standard. Some of the RME drivers get performance that is beyond what we would expect from USB 2.0. To achieve this RME treat the USB cable as a bit of wire, and completely re-write the USB audio protocol, implementing the USB controller on the FPGA.

It's unlikely we will ever get RME proprietary drivers for Linux, but it is likely that ALSA class compliant drivers are good enough.
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Re: High end audio interface

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On the other hand, Totalmix fx controls the device's mic gains, Phantom power and other settings. Except the 802 device has a pot for the mic gain. I'm using a Mixbus 32c in the studio and I'd like to leave all the juice to it, and do the monitoring via UFX+.
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by merlyn »

  • Linux
  • TotalMix (hdspmixer)
  • USB
Choose two. :D
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Re: High end audio interface

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Sad.
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by RockMaster »

artix_linux_user wrote: Tue Oct 11, 2022 1:47 pm Well, I owned several RME audio interfaces over the last 3 decades.
On windows and OSX the RMe drivers are stable and fast and the total mix software is nice to have yes.
Besides that, RMe has good overall product quality.
Having written this, I must admit, I think RME are much too overpriced.
The soundquality of the converters as well as of the preamps is ok but not that good.
So you will get ESI Audio sound and product quality for the price of an Apogee...but again RMe is not Apogee - they have nothing to do with Apogee...
As Motu and its converters have nothing to do with the AKM converters that were integrated in the Pro Tools products.
So, for me when it comes to audio interfaces,most important is latency and sound quality.
So, for me, RME is over and out - prices are much to high.
Some one mentioned the FPGA or how its called chip of the Motu products...the Xilinx...
Thanks for the info of this thing being slow!
Yeah, RME is such a modern and progressive and innovative company that they are still using the Xilinx instead of using their own custom designed Risc-V chip.
I could allways use all of my RME devices perfectly integrated into Linux - even the total mix was there in its foss reincarnation.
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cheerioh
I too think RME is overpriced. But in order for a high end audio interface to be feasible, especially for linux, it must have enough critical mass in the market. So that enough people buy it, test it, report regarding support, compatibility and other stuff. RME is in that place, you can judge that from this thread and others like it. Even though they don't officially support linux, they have a dedicated section for it on their forum. That's something.

Another critical feature for linux is the ability to fully control the interface without the software. How many other brands have that? I know my Scarlett doesn't, it's just so popular that a 3rd party GUI was created for it by a member of this very forum.
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Re: High end audio interface

Post by merlyn »

sjzstudio wrote: Mon Oct 10, 2022 5:03 pmSad.
I feel for you brother. It would be good if all the RME software, or free equivalent, was available for Linux. @Be. was working on something for the Babyface.

Image

RME may or may not hear the voice of Linux in their forum. The fact is I don't think it will make any difference. I would estimate about 1% of RME users are registered on the forum, so even if all of them made a noise about Linux, the vast majority of users are still on Windows or Mac.
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