896MK3, Windows 10 and a Firewire Controller - Experiences

[poowqnps]

Hello fellow MOTU users. I thought I' share my experiences with trying to get a firewire motu card working in windows 10 with a pci firewire controller here. I did however not manage to get it to work properly so don't hope for an happy ending, but maybe my experiences might be useful for someone else, or maybe there are lucky people on here who managed to got it to work?

OK, so brand new system out of the box right. A Intel i7-6700k @ factory default 4ghz. 16gb of DDR4 RAM on a ASUS Z170-P motherboard running a freshly installed Windows 10 pro 64bit. The motherboard don't have any onboard firewire ports so I bought a PCI card for that. After a lot of reading through users with past experiences of this, both on this forum and elsewhere, I decided to go for a noname card with two Texas Instrument chips (TSB43AB23) and the possibility for external power through the PSUs floppy-connector. Using Ableton 9 32bit.

When everything was installed, I installed the latest MOTU drivers that are said to be windows 10 ready and no problem occured, turned on my MOTU 896MK3 and.... nothing. cuemix or audio console claimed no motu card connected. ok weird, it didn't show up in the device manager. a new reboot and turning of and on the card and voila, there it is. Motu audio 64 in the device manager. Turned on Cuemix, weird, it took like 20 seconds for cuemix to start and it didn't seem to be able to connect to the card because all levars are at 0 and - hm weird, Motu audio 64 just dissapered from the device manager (that I had still open) and boom. BSOD IRQ less or not equal OH1394.SYS. ok something weird going on with the firewire.

After some googling I stumbled upon similar problems and a microsoft fix with firewire legacy drivers for windows 8.1 that several people on a microsoft forum and a focusright forum claimed did the trick for them in Windows 10.

I uninstalled the motu drivers and turned of the motu card before installing the legacy drivers just to be sure. then installed everything again and it seems to be working. Only difference that the OHCI tool no longer seems to find the firewire controller settings. Well, MOTU audio 64 shows up in device manager. the fire wire controller set to legacy, what can go wrong? I install the latest ASIO4ALL drivers and fire up ableton live, set the sound card to Motu Audio and BOOOM. BSOD. This time it says MEMORY_MANAGEMENT MOTUFWA64.SYS. Is it the motu driver? I retry a few times, reinstlaling various drivers and so on, same problem, always a BSOD and even a few blank reboots without any BSOD when I try to access the motu card through ableton live and/or cuemix, sometimes they also just freeze up and I have to do a hard reboot to turn them of. Everytime any of this happen, I have to turn of and on the motu card to get windows to detect it again, even if I reboot windows.

Oh well, calling it a day. Wake up the next morning. go through my bios settings and set a few PCI-e settings from the factory default disabled to auto, even though the firewire controller is not PCI. I also doublechecked my mobo chipset drivers but they were up to date. same with the graphic card (geforce 970ti). I noticed I missed to install the intel rapid storage sata drives so I did this. Pessimisticly rebooted, turned on the motu card, started cue mix and weirdly it didnt freeze up, it still didnt seem to find the motu card but this time I could move the levers even though it had a 5 sec lag when doing so. weird. turned on ableton, system freeze. Reboot. opened MOTU audio console and changed the buffer size from 256 to 1024. Turned ableton back on, surprise, it managed to load the motu audio! success? Tried to make some sounds but there is an enormous lag. Basically 3-10 seconds on the screen and no sound coming out from the card. But at least no freezes or BSODs, just unusable and weird.

Now this is as far as I got before I gave up. I tested the MOTU card on my old system and it works perfectly. Thinking of getting rid of it and getting an USB card instead.

Sorry for the long post, hope it helps someone in the future. Here is a potato.

Cheers

[poowqnps]

Well, a new candidate for the culprit has presented himself.
The Firewire controller card I bought was supposed to be dualchip with a floppy power connection for a more stable powersupply. It said so in the ebay ad, it said so in the manual, and on the box. I had previously checked that the chip on the card was an actual TI chip.

Since the symptoms kind of synced with how a bad firewire controller that didnt have a stable power supply and a fast enough chip would act, I took a closer look.

Turns out the firewire card is a hoax. The second chip emplacement was empty (!) and the psu connector was soldered to go nowhere (!!!)

So let this be a lesson to you all... Don't buy chinese.

I'll still let you know if it worked with a "real" firewire card as soon as I find one.

have a good day.

[Edgetone]

Hi,

I just upgraded to a new computer. I have a Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 motherboard and a simliar Firewire card, a SIIG nn-e20012-s2. It also is a Chinese board with the "power" connector.

I had this card in my previous PC running Windows 7. It had no issues.

In the new PC I installed Windows 10, got everything set up, then swapped it for my old system. I could not get the MOTU 828mk3 to work. It is detected, but no sound. CueMix freezes, then continues, then freezes.

So I figured I would just reinstall with Windows 7. Surprisingly, same issue. I suspect that the cheap firewire card with the newer motherboard is the only real issue here.

So, I'm tracking down another card. I'll let you know if I get something that works. A local fellow is selling some used ones for only a few bucks, so I'll try one of those before ordering a new one.

Let me know if you have success. It would suck to have to upgrade to a 828x just to get things working again, but then again, I love to have new gear.


Jon