Firewire pcie card, n12 and new win 11 PC

Steinberg Lounge
1

hello everyone, I have a question on firewire. my father is finally buying a new PC (he was worried about cubase, his mixer and win 10/11 compatibility, a legitimate issue), and I read a little of the website that’s linked to fix problems, the studio 1 website (I can’t post links apparently). He is using a N12 Yamaha with his win 7 pc which he uses with a PCI card (I don’t know if he’s using a pcie slot or pci slot, since the PC is from a while ago at this point and I am not there to open up the PC, so I don’t have this info).
Anyways, when he called HP support, they said firewire PCIe card won’t work with the motherboard of this PC he is interested in, the HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-3025t (I’d post the link but once again, can’t). Here are the Reno mobo specs on expansion slots: * One PCI Express Gen 3.0 x16

  • One PCI Express Gen 3.0 x1

  • Two M.2 expansion slots

    • One M.2 socket 1, Key A

    • One M.2 socket 3, Key M, (2280/2242)
      An HP customer service rep recommended some strange USB connection which doesn’t sound right. I checked the mobo specs and I fail to see why, for example, a firewire pcie card wouldn’t work. as long as it has a TI chipset, should be all right, yeah? there are 2 slots on the mobo. perhaps the support agent meant to say firewire itself won’t work on win 11 but there are potentially? workarounds. so, my father just wants a clarification. Of course he will keep his current PC, so I guess if it isn’t possible, then that would have to be the solution, but it would be more convenient if he could use his existing mixer on the new win11 PC. I got him more RAM as well to use in the new PC so it would be better if we could get all of this to work. Thanks for the assistance all.

2

Hi
image

I can’t see why a PCIe firewire card wouldn’t work unless Win 11 has removed the ability to install the Win 8.1 firewire driver . Plus the N12 is still supported firewire wise in the OS’s
Yamaha Steinberg FW Driver V1.6.6 for Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7(SP1) (64-bit) - Yamaha - Other European Countries

I moved for a Pci to Pcie firewire card this year on Win 10

3

I’m using a PCIe card with an LSI chip on Windows 10, and I expect it should work on Windows 11 as well.
image
FW643 PCI Express 1394b PHY/Link Open Host Controller Interface

I think the recommendation for a TI chip dates back to Windows 7 days or before, so I would suggest trying a PCIe card regardless of the chip. Although Microsoft have dropped Firewire support, that doesn’t mean it won’t work.

The Firewire card might be OK, but then the audio drivers have to work on top of that. I suspect the bigger problem would be getting the Yamaha N12 driver to work on Windows 11.

4

I posted the N12 firewire driver above ands it supports win 11

5

It is possible to have an old FW interface working by installing the “legacy driver”, as long as it’s a PCIe card (not plain PCI). You can google many recipes to do so.

If it does not work with about ~1 hour of investment… what I would do is simply trash the old FW card (or build a museum for it :wink: ) and buy just about any 2-channel USB interface. Anything recent will have better converters than the internal ADC in the N12 and be more stable. A UR22C (or similar) is about $200 and you have countless good options for $100 in the used market. Just pick something recent.

But yes, it is worth trying first with the legacy driver with your good ol’ FW card, just don’t waste a week wrapping duct tape around it if it’s not working. Good luck with that, and please share your final conclusions.

6

I’m using a PE-107 PCI-e FireWire 800 card, with Windows 11, a Yamaha N8, with last available set of drivers, etc. All works successfully.

7

Thanks for the information everyone. Really appreciate it. We’ll be trying it out and I’ll update with results hopefully!