Comments on: Which FireWire Cable Do I Need?

Question: Which FireWire Cable Do I Need?

mdavis1982 — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:40:15 -0800

Which FireWire cable do I need?

I have a PreSonus FirePod and an iMac.

I already have a firewire hard disk plugged into the firewire 400 port on my iMac, and need to connect the FirePod to it tomorrow.

Am I right in thinking that if I use a cable such as this one it should work without a hitch?

Please help me hive mind! I need to get my studio set up going really quickly!

By: adamrice

adamrice — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:56:17 -0800

According to the specs on the firepod, it has a Firewire 400 interface. So you do not want the cable pictured--you want a regular Firewire 400 cable, with 6-pin connectors (the arrowhead shaped ones) at each end. I'd be a little surprised if your new gadget didn't include one.

By: mdavis1982

mdavis1982 — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:00:18 -0800

Yup.. it has a FW 400 interface... But I'm wondering if I can plug it into a FW800 port and it still work because I don't have a spare FW400 port on the back of my machine?

By: RichardP

RichardP — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:07:48 -0800

Firewire 800 ports are backwards compatible with Firewire 400 devices, but do require that you use a FW800 to FW400 cable (such as the one to which you linked) or you can install a FW800->FW400 adapter (e.g. Sonnet's adapter ~$15) and use a standard FW400 cable.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:10:52 -0800

A FW800-to-FW400 cable will work just fine with your iMac. Your audio adapter and iMac will talk to each other at FW400 speed.

By: mdavis1982

mdavis1982 — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:18:50 -0800

Excellent! Thanks for the help!

By: adamrice

adamrice — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:43:10 -0800

AFAICT, most firewire devices are built with two ports for daisy-chaining. Just out of curiosity, is there a reason not to do this?

By: hattifattener

hattifattener — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:53:41 -0800

The Firepod's manual shows that its has two 6-pin firewire connectors on the back, so you could presumably daisy-chain it to some other FW400 device. The only reason I can think of not to do this is if the devices are bus-powered and you run out of power on that chain. Or if the combined devices on that host port use too much bandwidth, but that seems unlikely (10 ports * 192ksps * 16bps * 2ch = 62Mbps, and Firewire can get a lot closer to its "full" data rate than many buses).