AI: Presonus Firestudio Mobile or Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP

vbakh · #1 09-21-2010, 02:13 PM

I've tried Presonus Firestudio Mobile and wasn't satisfied by stability of the Windows driver, even with TI-based firewire card. I had similar issues with Presonus Inspire 1394 on another computer, so I am thinking about swiching to something else.
Are Focusrite drivers for Windows stable? Is there anything comparable to Saffire Pro 24 DSP from price/performance prospective and working in Windows 7 64bit?

Gutch · #2 10-08-2010, 09:58 AM

Sorry for the late reply. Re: Focusrite drivers, all I can relay is my experience with them. I have a Saffire Pro40 interface and was running it via Firewire to a Win7 64 bit machine (Core2 Quad @ 3GHz, 8GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA graphics). Using SONAR 8.5PE as my DAW software, I had big time problems with dropouts and latency. I put a TI chipset FW card in the machine as I heard that Focusrite had an issue with non-TI (LSI, etc.) FW chipsets. Did not solve the problem.

This was the straw that broke the camel's back in my DAW situation. I was also having problems with MOTU drivers in WIN7 which precipitated me selling my 2408 mk3 and getting the Focusrite. When that didn't help, I ended up scrapping the whole PC system and bought an iMac and Presonus Studio One Pro DAW software.

I will tell you that everything is running smooth as silk now. No BSOD from Windows, no latency issues, no dropouts, and audio quality is top shelf. The downside is I am having to learn a whole new software and I miss some of the plugins that I had with SONAR. I refuse to put Windows on the Mac, as that defeats the purpose of making the switch.

So, to answer your question, in my situation the Focusrite drivers were not able to run in a stable environment. YMMV...

vbakh · #3 10-22-2010, 05:30 PM

Thanks Gutch.
I noticed your reply too late. I already bought Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP. I use it with Windows 7 / 64 bit. I works well so far, I don't have any complains. I returned Presonus Firestudio Mobile because it didn't work well with the same TI-based FW card on the same machine.