I always wanted a Universal Audio Apollo interface and I came across one on ebay for $800 dollars. They sell for about $1,800 new, so I quickly bought it. Not knowing the specifics on the hook up, I watched a video on how to hook it up. The first thing it said was to get a firewire card for your computer. I didn’t know what a firewire was so then it was a “what is firewire” video, and in doing so, I also see that many on the video are saying USB is better. So my question is, before I buy a $200 firewire card is, did I buy a good thing or is this outdated and hence the reason for the lower price?
Most definitely outdated. Apple brought out Firewire back in the day (almost 20 years ago if I’m not mistaken). In the day it was amazing because it was soooo much better than USB 1, and you could hook up cameras and hard drives and get blazing speeds comparatively. PC’s didn’t really catch onto Firewire, or 1394 as they creatively called it and as you say, you need a Firewire card to get it working on a PC.
You can’t readily convert FireWire to USB with a cable or a dongle, but I think a cheaper Firewire PCI card might be an option for you. Once it’s connected, you should be good to go.
Wow, I didn’t know that! I just checked and that indeed is the official word… However, I’m running my Firewire interface fine on Win 10 so far, so good!
Hey thanks the that suggestion and support. I was depressed once I figure it out its old but I feel pretty good about it now. I will look for a cheap PCI card and try to get it up and running. Thanks again.
I run multiple firewire cards on my windows 7 pc without problem. I would suggest you look for a pcie card that is based on the Texas Instruments chip set as those seem to be more reliable than others.
You shouldn’t have to pay more than $40-60 USD for a pcie firewire card.
You should check to see if your interface requires a firewire 400 or firewire 800 interface/connection as I don’t know how old the interface you are looking at.
If it makes you feel better, I bought a Focusrite interface years ago that had a Firewire only connection. I had it plugged into a MacBook that had ditched Firewire for Thunderbold. so I had ridiculous situation where I had a Firewire 400 cable, with a adapter to 800, plugging into and adapter that converted it to Thunderbold plugged into my MacBook. Looked awful having that stuck out of the side of the MacBook, but damn - I loved that interface.
Once you’ve got it connected with the cable to your computer, install whatever drivers you need and then forget about how its connected!
There are a few different firewire driver options available under win 7 and you might need to modify the settings if you run into problems, but usually the default driver works correctly.
If you do get any errors, please post the error to this thread and the members should be able to help you debug the problem.
The Apollo is a sweet interface, I hope all goes well for you.
This is why I LOVE this site, and tell everyone to join, even those who don’t record music. There is no better group of helpful people then on this site. Even people with the user name “Wicked” are nice here.
If that thing works, please follow up and let us know. I have about 15 interfaces and converters that run on firewire. I’ve avoided buying a FW to thunderbolt doc, because they’re usually about $300. If that you can get that working, that’d be amazing!
I’ll pick up a couple of those cards, throw them in the external expansion chassis, then I can start using those older devices again with newer computers.
Look for TI chipset fw card.
Overall I’ve had much better results on fw than anything else but it is old tech.
Win10 Creators update broke my fw drivers and thus I had to relegate my old fw to being an 8 ch preamp.I run a Tascam 16 chan usb interface now, supplemented with my old fw interface as passthru preamp providing 8 channels.
I had much better latency on fw but for time being I got 2 ch IK Axe/IO for home and left the fw world as it has no forward compatibility.
