what's up with hw driver developement ?

ORIGINAL: potatopie

Hi guys,

I am thinking that it might be the time to change and renew part of my studio hw. I am now using a digital mixer (beringher ddx3216) as the center of it. I plug eveything there : The adat out of my pc, mic's, my CD player, POD, sansamp, synths, modules, intruments in general, etc.
I may like to move to a mixerless aproach, with a firewire hw solution with DSP that provides a 8/10/12/16 inputs and a software mixer that will allow me to send monitor mixes, patch an internal effect or insert an external reverb, etc. You get the idea, don't you ?

Ok, now... MOST of the reports and reviews I've read about this type of HW (Focusrite, mackie onyx, Alesis Multimix, Yamaha N12, TcElectronic's Studio Konnekt, Motu...) say the drivers are crap, or that the driver developement is slow, untrustable, uncertain or that they just don't work with sonar... What's going on ? I want to choose a product but they all have bad reviews !!!! Are all these devices too "new" ?

I think it's sad but true.. and not new. Drivers have always been the problem with most computer interfaces. RME, Echo, M-Audio, and Lynx seem to do an OK job and update theirs fairly often but all the other brands seem to take a ship it and forget it attitude. Then all the development staff moves on to the next product in the chain and if the existing ones need work it just doesn't happen. Driver development seems to be frozen after the device starts shipping. I've seen this happen for years. I don't know if it's because they don't have the talent on the development staff or if it's just not a priority for management.

I really like the some of the new ones myself, some even have built in effects you can use while monitoring at zero latency. Even the new M-Audio FastTrack has that. I just wish the drivers were good on all of them so there would be more real choice.

In some cases the problem with drivers might be limited to those who use specfic features. For example latency might not be good on some of them but if you use the DSP mixer only and don't run any software synths in real time it's a non issue to you. But for those who do that stuff it's a show stopper. Some also might have a problem with the computer firewire chipset or other conflicts that cause things to look worse then they are. And, if you work at one sample rate all the time then if the device doesn't autoswitch like a normal sound card then that's not a big deal for you. So you really have to research it to see if any of the problems really affect your setup.

My advice is to make sure you can return the device and get at least most of your money back if it doesn't work. And if it doesn't work with the current drivers don't let the vendor tell you it will be fixed in the next release... tell them fine, I'll get my money back and buy another one when you get it fixed !