Motu Ultralite MK3 won't work with my asus laptop

[steinary]

Ok .....so their homepage doesnt say anything about the ricoh chipset, I thougt they did but it seems like I am wrong.

When I was reasearching this, I red a lot about problems with the ricoh chipset and controller from other users.

The answer I got from motus tech-link when asking about chipset was:

The Traveler will work with any recently manufactured Motherboard provided the computers Firewire card features either a Texas Instrument or Lucent chipset.

And if its like Reeper says, that this is a general problem for all FW soundcards, motu cant do anything about it other than inform the salespeople that sell their products to inform their customers about this issue before they buy.

This would save customers like me from a lot of trouble.

If you have a desktop, in worst case you have to change the motherboard or the FW card.

When using a laptop you have to get a new one with the right chipset. (this is not too easy because the producers in most cases doesnt have any FW chipset specs on their homepages)

If you open the driveriinformation it should look like this: Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller

On my HP laptop it only said: OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller.


Steinar

[acidrecords]

yes, but the •••• is same with fw expresscard with ti chipset. (for me and others..with winxp)
@ vista it works.

[squareape]

The incompatibility seems to extend to other manufacturers also (m-audio, presonus). The Ricoh chips do not always cause problems in those cases, even in the motu case I think.

The reason why the expresscard doesn't work miracles is because it is controlled by the same ricoh chip. In most laptops this chip controls up to seven I/0 functions (cheapness):
different flash memory formats, firewire, pc card/expresscard. The fact that a separate chip controls the expresscard, is remniscent of the old pc card (no direct pinning to the motherboard). And supposedly the Ricoh treats the expresscard as a usb 2.0 connection, causing the low bandwith (this is a intermittent way of dealing with the expresscard, until full PCI implementation is achieved) or it just has meager throughput capacity.

Further problems are caused by the minimalist way of programming the bios in laptops, often devices use the same IRQ's/PCI channels.

Some things that helped other users:

- throttling down the onboard graphics card (i.e. giving it a lower priority) ' xp '
- disabling a specific dvd drive by TC corp, because of resource sharing and interference.
-updating the bios (an update by dell is known to have increased the bandwidth through the ricoh chip by 5 times for the card bus in some computers)
-disabling any other devices coordinated by the ricoh chip (they listen on the same channel) and other peripherals (wlan etc.) again because of resource sharing and interference.
-using a expresscard with TI chip, is known to stablize the audio somewhat.
-power the motu device with an adapter, instead of buspower (even with a 6-pin bus) .
-installing the dedicated driver for the ricoh chip (sometimes a generic windows driver is used)

The ricoh chip is known to work sometimes, although less throughput (i.e. simultaneous tracks) can be expected. The fact is that people with working chips don't complain on the internet.

I apologize for any mistakes in the above, as I only recently started researching this for my laptop to be.

Luuk

[Chappo]

Hi everyone,
Nothing i tried got the MOTU to work with my laptop at all.
I ended up getting a response from MOTU and it told me what i knew already.
I have since sold my laptop and am now looking for a new one.
I will start a new post asking for recommendations for which new laptop to buy.
Thanks for the help,
Chappo

[reeper]

Buy iBM/Lenovo.

[Ascend]

Hi, my first post. I just purchased a 8pre and i have plugged it up to my amd gaming rig to make sure it worked and all since my desktop has a TI firewire chipset on my asus motherboard. I'm in the process of building a new recording rig with windows xp pro. I was looking for info on what cpu to try. I then came across this post dealing with some firewire expresscards in laptops and it got me thinking about my laptop. I never planned on recording with it since it had no onboard firewire connection. So after reading this post i went to see what kind of ti chipset it had in it. Turns out to be a texas instruments firewire host controller. So my question is would a TI firewire express card work with a TI onboard OHCI compliant IEEE 1394 host controller that is on the laptop? So i can hook the 8 pre up to it. Or does these problems exist for the laptop ti chipset like the rico ect in using an express card in general on a laptop?

Link to expresscard i've looked at: http://www.startech.com/item/EC1394B2-2 ... -Card.aspx .... i emailed this place and within just couple of hours i had a response saying it used a TI chipset in the card.

My Laptop specs:
Just bought it new half year ago mainly used for ebay and general computer stuff long sitting on couch watching tv

Toshiba x205-S7483 1.67ghz
17" display
2 gig memory - will be upgraded to more if used for recording
intel core 2 duo T5450
Nivida geforce 8700 gt 256mb
dvd drive/burner
240 gig harddrive 2 x 120 gig
4 karman kardon speakers with sub - which won't be used if recording....

[maza]

I have similar problem with my 828MK3. I have tested it with three different laptops. Two of them even has TI chipset and one doesn't. Still I end up with this problem with all computers. I have dropouts in all three computers. Computers with TI chipset the problem doesn't happen so often but still it keeps coming. So I think it's not only chipset issue. And when we are talking about firewire specification itself we are talking about the general specification that has been accepted by computers manufacturers all over the world. It means that each and every product that has firewire should work in any computer. If it doesn't work they are breaking the firewire specification and because of that they should list all the computers that are able to use their firewire connection. In this case it's MOTU that I'm talking about. What you would think about if you will buy a mobile phone, let say Nokia, and your operator says that "Sorry but you can use only Sony Ericsson in our network". I talking about similar thing. Firewire has general specification and every product that has been designed and manufactured accordingly should work without exeption. I have done reglamation of this to MOTU techlink, I have even sent a sound sample that has three dropouts in 80 seconds. So far I haven't got any help to this problem. In my case I talking about Warranty issue as well, but the reseller of MOTU don't want take this responsibility. They sent a new MOTU to me as replacement but this device had same problem. And when I complained about this they just rised their hands and said "It's not our problem any more".

[acidrecords]

open motu techlink and post the this thread! they should wake up and fix this now!! i`m also waiting for this to be fixed.
(with firewire 400 expresscard!)

[VigilantSound]

You did not uninstall the driver correctly before you reinstalled.

[P.J]

Hi everybody!
This is my first post. I wanna but MOTU 8pre or UltraLite mk3, but my laptop is Dell Vostro 1500 which has RICOH firewire chipset
Please recommend me a WORKING Firewire ExpressCard !

Thanks !

[acidrecords]

@ all read this thread!!

http://forum.msi.com.tw/index.php?topic ... #msg939234

[P.J]

Please help me !!!
I wanna buy it soon

[acidrecords]

every expresscard with ti chipset should work.

but also your notebook can be a problem

getting it work is a game..

[oktorockto]

Bought A Lenovo s10e specifically to use with an Ultralite Mk3 bought the same week.

I too have the problem with a slow cuemix console - changes with the mouse take about 3 seconds to update. Havent even tested the audio yet as severely hacked off!

I am using an Expresscard with a TI chipset.

Will post a Techlink when I get a chance.

[acidrecords]

1) lastest bios for ideapad installed?

if yes, read this. it works with this notebook.
if you are on xp2 hope you have installed microsoft firewirepatch... support.microsoft.com/kb/885222

and then read this:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/11/2 ... take-note/

this:

http://www.gizmag.com/lenovos-ideapad-s ... d/10443/5/

and this:
http://www.s10lenovo.com/viewtopic.php? ... &sk=t&sd=a


so you see link 1+2 there all is working fine

link 3 someone has problems

so one thing is clear. it`s possible to get it work on ideapad. rest is up to you