LinuxMusicians

I've a pair of Edirol DA2496 PCI cards, which it should be possible to synchronise the wordclock on.

The documentation for these states you can't run at 96kHz with a word-clock synch on the external 1U rack units; at that frequency the synch has to be done with a jumper between the two cards. I've tried wiring that up in every way I can imagine, but I end up getting Xruns (on a single card). I also note no option in Mudita24 to, as the manual states, tell the slave PCI card that it is to use an external source for the word clock. I've has some fairly dreadful noise with a number of Jack settings when both cards are in, which someone else may have encountered with these or some of the Delta ICE1712 variants.

The system has an i5core CPU, so Jack will even run at 0.333ms latency when I've only one card installed.

I'd guess the problem(s) I'm looking at here are:

• How do I set the jumpers/DIP switches on the master/slave PCI cards?
• How do I tell the slave card it is to use an external wordclock source (jumper from master)?
• Obligatory stupid question: It's always card0 should be the source/sender of the wordclock synch?

I've seen various How-Tos on pairing the cards up into a single virtual card, but I'm not yet at this point; I want to be sure each will work flawlessly, with the other installed in the system, before being that ambitious.

Think I've figured out part of the problem with noise and Xruns; I show shared IRQs with the sound card(s):

irq/16-ehci_hcd
irq/19-snd-ice1
irq/16-snd-ice1
irq/19-serial

This is a brand new system, with a Gigabyte GA-H87-HD3 motherboard. I'm assuming I'm going to have to keep playing with BIOS settings to stop these interrupt conflicts.

After trying what felt like a million different variations on the settings for the BIOS in my GigaByte motherboard, I resolved the interrupt conflict problem I've been experiencing. One unusual/weird thing I do see is, if I go straight to cat /proc/interrupts on startup, I show "serial" conflicting with one of the ICE1712 cards. That goes away within the first few minutes. I have disabled serial in the BIOS, but it seems as-if Linux is assuming this is required until some point not long after startup.

What my next hurdle is, would be pairing up the two Edirol DA2496 cards into a single, virtual, sound card. I've seen two forms/formats for writing the .asoundrc file. First, is the one given here - http://www.jrigg.co.uk/linuxaudio/ice1712multi.html - which works, but gives a bucketload of (apparently spurious) Xruns. The cards are synched with a wordclock cable connector, so they're not drifting apart. The second format I've seen for writing .asoundrc files is here: http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=9518 and uses ttable. That's for RME hardware, which is a little bit outside my budget.

Which form/format would people recommend? And, are the recommendations to drop jackdbus appropriate?

Hi there,

I am actually considering using the same motherboard as you for my new build, however I have heard of these latency issues with the new cards. Apparently I am better off using a 1156 pin motherboard if I can find one?!
Have you discovered a solution yet?

Cheers