Firewire to SPDIF

Yeah :( this weekend I tried out a couple of options with different Firewire cables,better digital cable etc. stillc annot make iot sound as good as my transport..it is the "smoothness' in music which is missing..something which the Trends UD10 does much better but at the expense of details.
i even re-recorded a FLAC into a CDR and that too sounds better ... are you using any other driver ? from what i read M-Audio drivers are C$@#

Arj,

That is very strange. I haven't any issues with smoothness. I am running Vista service pak 2 (32 bit) and using the M Audio drivers, and no issues. I do have a pretty beefed up PC. Maybe the power supply is the issue. I used the power supply when I first got it and didn't like it at all. I haven't heard anything about the MAudio drivers, but than I really didn't look for info on it as it's working very well for me. I'll go through the above posts and see if you advised what os you were using, etc. If I see something worth mentioning, I'll let you know. Not sure if you tried the WASAPI but I keep thinking the power supply may be an issue-just not sure at this point.

Arj,

I just did some poking around. The Compaq PCMCIA card may be an isue as well. I'm assuming device manager doesn't show any issues. I'm not familiar with the technology on the interface but I would speculate, perhaps, a better card may help? I'd hate to have you spend more money, but may be worth a shot. I am also thinking, with that great DAC of yours, you may not need the Monarchy? Or...are you using the dip to upsample? Maybe disengaging (upsampling)that as well-or just taking it out to listen? I only use the DIP cause my MF XDAC3 isn't very top of the line these days, while your DAC is pretty much state of the art. I use spdif - out from the DAC; I see you use the 110 ohm out. I'm searching for a PCMCIA card with a 4 pin out as well, whih would eliminate the power supply.

It just may be a bottleneck. let me try to borrow another card and give it a shot because i got worst results with the built in I-Link in my toshiba laptop

Arj & Cerrot -- Not sure if this is relevant, but I want to make you aware that firewire chips made by Via, which are widely used on many motherboards and cards that have firewire interfaces, have a long tradition of not working very well. TI (Texas Instruments) firewire chips are vastly preferable.

That is documented in many user posts you can find on the net, and I can tell you from personal experience that when doing digital video captures Via firewire chips drop frames at least every few minutes, while TI chips NEVER do, even in the same machine running the same programs. Although of course the data rates that involves are considerably higher than for audio.

You should be able to determine which chip you have by looking at the board or card, or possibly from the manufacturer's literature.

Hope that helps,
-- Al