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Focusrite Saffire Pro 40
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Focusrite Saffire Pro 40

Thread Windows 10 and Saffire Firewire issues

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1 Windows 10 and Saffire Firewire issues
This may be of help.
For the last year all has been well running Windows 10 with the legacy 1394 drivers. Two weeks ago I had a windows update and I started to suffer constant drop-outs - the FW Active light would just turn off. Trust me, I uninstalled and reinstalled many things - even the nVidia display drivers - but the problem remained.
In desperation I switched to the old VIA 1394 driver in my Windows 10 list and, after 24 hours, everything is still working. (I tried this driver when I had the same problem after a Windows update a year ago. Back then it didn't help - most odd).
I am not looking forward to the next Windows update.
Tim

[ Post last edited on 10/28/2018 at 01:26:02 ]

2
OK so than idea failed shortly after I posted my comment. However, having installed the VIA drivers and then going back to the legacy drivers I have managed 4 hours editing im Adobe Premiere without a single drop-out.
3
...but not for long.

However, everything is now working again after I made two changes. Unfortunately I cannot say which one fixed the problem - very sloppy work for a professional tester but I was fed up with the whole thing and just wanted to fix it.

1. I took the Firewire card out and cleaned the dust and fluff from the other two ports.

2. I put the card into a different slot in my PC. When I looked at the system settings in Windows 10 I could see that the USB controller items that it was sharing an IRQ with had changed (so it was now sharing with different hardware).

I am back with the legacy driver, a clean card and different shared IRQ and it's all working well.

Tim



[ Post last edited on 11/20/2018 at 03:41:10 ]

4
Hi Tim,

Your post has my interest.

I upgraded my PC’s hardware recently and went from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Experienced connectivity problems (FW Active led blinking/not lighting up, audio playback interrupted, then after reinstalling I didn’t get any connection at all) with my Pro 40. Changed FireWire card in accordance to the recommendations on the Focusrite website.
Problems seemed to have solved but came back after some days.
Decided to uninstall the (after upgrade to W10) new installed MixControl 3.7 software and instead install version 3.4 (after consulting Focusrite Support). Going down this route also forced me to downgrade my Pro 40’s firmware first, before I could use the MixControl 3.4 version software. I’m not that could with the technical part of computers, so I’m not sure which driver is associated with MixControl 3.4, but I know that besides removing the 3.7 MixControl software, I had to separately remove the driver from the hardware manager as well, before installation of the 3.4 MixControl.
I hope you can still follow me...

Right now the connection between PC and Pro 40 seems to be solid, however I still do experience little “buggy” stuff. Sometimes when I open a project in my DAW (Cubase 9.5) I get the notification that some ports are missing or are unmapped.
Everything seems to work ok though, but I don’t like these unpredictable issues at all.

Like I said, I’m not good with technical stuff. Perhaps I should give the most recent MixControl version 3.7 another try, but I may have done something wrong with (un)installing the Pro 40’s driver that’s associated with the MixControl software...

And then again, what’s the difference with this driver and the VIA 1394 you are mentioning? How do I know I have the proper driver installed?
Is the VIA 1394 driver only the driver for the FireWire card and should I look into this too?
And is your system now stable?

I hope you can give me some advice.

Best regards,
Marathanz