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| quote: | Originally posted by echosystm
It still blows my mind how many interface companies don't make their hardware class compliant. I have never seen a single feature in any unit that required a proprietary driver.
When I had M-Audio and Presonus interfaces, I was constantly chasing driver updates. I had to wait a year or more to have support for the latest OS, and even then they would only release it as a beta driver.
Looking at the Presonus forums, it looks like they haven't learned shit; all the new Audiobox VSL units officially only support Snow Leopard! They haven't had a non-beta driver for Mountain Lion, ever. Needless to say, if you went out and bought a new Mavericks computer, you would be completely fucked. If by some miracle they actually released a stable driver, the product would be discontinued soon after and you'd be left with an expensive brick that you can't even use because they don't support new operating systems. It's ridiculous!
Anyway, rant over.  |
It's s shame - MidiMan(M-audio) started out great but over time (especially once they got bought out) they just concentrated on making every more budget toys and their driver support went south. I remember working with the guys (all two of them) who were their tech support department for the entire UK. When the drivers started getting shitty they got inundated and just had to point everyone to the M-audio website and tell them to download the previous stable version.
About class compliance, it's true and it's not; Like windows itself, the USB audio class driver has to be all things to all devices and it's therefore not particularly efficient and that's why class compliant devices are nearly always limited in terms of I/O (usually 4/4 at most).
Another thing that sucks about class compliance is that windows (yes, even windows 8) is only USB 1.0 class compliant so the bandwidth is pathetic, then combine that with a pretty inefficient driver in the first place and I see why only simple devices are class compliant.
Mac OS is at least USB audio 2.0 class compliant and therefore has more bandwidth but still the same problem remains - it's a pretty bog standard driver and the hardware is trying to make the most of it (rather than good interfaces which have a synergy of well written drivers to perfectly compliment the hardware they have selected for that exact purpose).
it would be great if the USB 3.0 audio class driver was a lot better planned but so far, no one has any idea as to what it will be like.
If you want a great explanation of class compliance vs proprietary drivers, RME have made a great post on the support page of the UCX and somehow have managed to make the UCX do 18 channels in compliance mode although they admit the performance sucks compared to their proper driver.
http://www.rme-audio.de/en_support_...echinfo_cc_mode
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