Dont beat me up now, but now with cheap firewire cards all over the place, is 1394 a alternative for data transfer ? Smaller interface, higher speed. Thanks, Jo

Firewire is still expensive to implement if you're doing it yourself - ie, not buying a PC card manufactured in the hundreds of thousands - also, the bus architecture of the SA1100 doesn't have any external DMA, which isn't helpful (you get DMA to internal peripherals only).

It's not really needed, either. The PC software does all the transfers at once - you do all the mods to the player (add, delete, etc) then click sync and have a coffee. After the initial loading of the player with loads of stuff, you're usually just maintaining the collection - adding new tunes as you get them, etc, so huge bandwidth isn't needed.

Hugo

OK, i thought so. I was just wondering cause i just bought a 1934 card for like $80, so prices are getting low now. Thanks, Jo

> It's not really needed, either. The PC software does all the transfers at once - you do all the mods to the player (add, delete, etc)
> then click sync and have a coffee. After the initial loading of the player with loads of stuff, you're usually just maintaining the
> collection - adding new tunes as you get them, etc, so huge bandwidth isn't needed.

Yeah, but there is one feature of Firewire that would overcome what seems to be the main complaint with the USB implementation - peer-to-peer connectivity. Firewire is peer-to-peer technology, so you you would no longer have the problem you now have with not being able to run external devices over the USB bus, since the USB implementation on the empeg is (and can only be) as a slave device.

Something to ponder for the next generation empeg perhaps .... ;-)

Derek