Computer Experts/Recording Experts: Question!

[Niall McEvoy]

Hey all,
I have an excellent laptop available to me in the form of a Toshiba Qosmio, it's about a year old but it has hardly anything on it and is not used alot at all, anyway, I was wondering if it was possible to have a technician install a firewire port without the use of a card, since that causes latency problems, I'd love to get a Mac but they cost over a grand which is hard to attain for a 16 year old with no steady job.
So to recap:
Is there a way of adding firewire to a Windows Laptop without causing latency problems?
Obviously rep for answers.

[Butnutz]

probably not.
the card slots are designed to handle high-speed data cards...though they do cause a tad bit of latency.

your best bet might be either a USB based system, or to buy a firewire card and deal with the latency however you can.(this is how most protools le users gotta do it.)

some hardware has a "mix" knob that lets you blend between input and output. generally, for overdubbing, you would probably have the blend on 80-90% input, with the output volume cranked pretty high, and the channel you are recording muted so the monitoring latency doesnt mess up the performer.

[Niall McEvoy]

Thanks, not really the answer I wanted but thanks anyway.

[Butnutz]

no offense, but you asked a question without knowledge of the circuitry involved and i gave you a truthful answer. do you want people to lie to give you the answers you want?

how it works is that a laptop motherboard is built with very specific functionality. something like firewire MUST be designed into the motherboard, and cannot be added later. the amount of things that must be taken into account is quite alot.
it is not as simple as soldering a FW port into the computer.

latency is a fact of life for anyone recording into digital. using prosumer/consumer hardware, you can never expect to eliminate it. But there are efficient workarounds such as what is described in my first post.

[Niall McEvoy]

no offense, but you asked a question without knowledge of the circuitry involved and i gave you a truthful answer. do you want people to lie to give you the answers you want?

how it works is that a laptop motherboard is built with very specific functionality. something like firewire MUST be designed into the motherboard, and cannot be added later. the amount of things that must be taken into account is quite alot.
it is not as simple as soldering a FW port into the computer.

latency is a fact of life for anyone recording into digital. using prosumer/consumer hardware, you can never expect to eliminate it. But there are efficient workarounds such as what is described in my first post.

No, you got me all wrong, I'm completely grateful for your reply it's just that I would have liked there to have been a way to do it without latency, but with your information it doesn't seem possible, you clearly know alot more than me and I am thankful for the reply. I wasn't criticising your post at all. Thanks again for clearing it up.

[Butnutz]

my apologies for being grumpy...late night and early moring.

[DwSoFt]

yeah, it cant just be added, altho if you get a highly acclaimed card, the card itself might be lower latency thant a cheapo card but it wont get rid of the latency problem completely due to the port again

i suggest selling the laptop somehow and get a laptop with a FW port or even a full computer

[Niall McEvoy]

Ok, so if I was to get a Windows PC, you can get great custom ones on eBay and they all say they include firewire, a firewire called IEEE 1394 or sometihng, is this firewire the same or comparable to Apple Firewire in terms of latency etc?

[Butnutz]

Ok, so if I was to get a Windows PC, you can get great custom ones on eBay and they all say they include firewire, a firewire called IEEE 1394 or sometihng, is this firewire the same or comparable to Apple Firewire in terms of latency etc?


IEEE 1394 is just the technical name for the "Firewire Protocol." Latency comes from a few different things:

1] Data Bus Speeds
2] Convertor Latency cause by not using entire samples and having to wait half of 1/44100th of a second to being processing audio again. the hardware has built in error correction, so you dont hear this, but it happens sometimes.
3] Software
4] Buffer Size
5] Ram Speed and Size.

[Niall McEvoy]

So it's kinda the same thing? Rep coming your way for all the answers btw. I have to spread the love first, but I'll remember

[Butnutz]

So it's kinda the same thing? Rep coming your way for all the answers btw. I have to spread the love first, but I'll remember


yeah, FW is the same as IEEE 1394. Im not sure that its exactly the same in terms of latecny, but probably very close to apple. i was reading up on it yesterday afternoon after i posted and found out that apple integrates FW slightly differently, which is why on a MAC, you can start up in target disk mode, and why FW devices on a mac are usually very very stable.



EDIT:
the newest 2 generations of PC motherboards have IEEE 1394 built in and fully integrated so that they perform with excellent specs.

[Niall McEvoy]

Ok great, thanks for that

[DwSoFt]

thanks for the rep man, get a newer computer, so that the bus is a new one and then latency goes down