Howdy!

I would like to share a piece of information which I am hoping will be helpful to the ALSA development community. This information is regarding the RME HDSP Multiface/Digiface family of products. We know from

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Vendor-RME

and

http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-hdsp

that we have a PCI driver for Linux thanks to Paul Davis, Marcus Andersson, Thomas Charbonnel (and probably others). However, RME recently came out with a new PCI Express (PCI-E) interface for these products.

Here is where is gets interesting: I've been trying to ascertain whether I should purchase the PCI-E HDSPe card for my Linux box. I prayed to the RME gods on their forum and none other than Matthias Carstens of RME responded that

"The PCIe cards are fully downward compatible, so can be used even with the oldest Windows drivers. So I expect Linux to work with them too." (http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1031)

Is it possible that he is right? Will the old PCI Linux driver work just the same (or better) with the newer PCI-E card? For some reason I just naturally thought the PCI-E card would need its own special driver.

Or is the only way to know to just buy and see if it works? That seem like an expensive way to find out...

Thanks!

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