posted 06 December 2011 21:27            

Kind of bulky and expensive when you add the Express Card for FW800 as well, but its a start - good to see something out there at last - I wonder what the hol dup has been - I'm guessing that Apple wanted to ship a few monitors as the only option before opening the doors to everyone else. I want to use an Airbook to run Kyma, so small and portable is the key.

posted 07 December 2011 00:09            

But then i was informed that thunderbold, even with a large "firewire adapter" like the "apple thunderbold display" is not tested with any of my so called "special", "pro", or audio FW hardware except my harddrives... :-(

As a muscian i am out of the hardware/software business for some time, but to me it seems something like a PCI extender port via a small fragile cable (smaller but similar to the PCI extenders from Magna).
hmmm...
... it is fast!

But it might force most of the 3rd party manufactures to implement a new low level protocol (maybe except for those already manufacturing PCI & PCI-ExpressCards or PCI Bus Drivers for Mac OS X ... Hello Sonnet, Apple, Motu, Digidesign, ATI,NVIDIA and ?!)

The Sonnet "echo" seams to be a promising solution since it is just a Thunderbold (PCI) to PCI-Express adapter... and the drivers for the Express cards are already available ...

Hopefully the implementation is transparent and there is not so much to rewrite for all the others who trusted on support of standards like IEEE 1394... :-(

I would be really happy to see a working solution, but honestly i don t know if it is possible for existing systems without new hardware/drivers.

I think i might go for a small "custom" mac with standard FW ports first ;-)
... or a big Macbook Pro ...which in the current generation has 1 ("ONE") FW port left and no exchangeable battery ;-(

Anyway i will look for a future host to support my pacarana .. and there are plenty of options for professional hardware ...

All the best
Chris