Although all of our units feature a 6-pin FireWire connection, users are able to use a 4-pin adapter as all data is transfered in these pins alone.  The additional 2 pins are for bus powering units, which none of the Helix Boards support and, out of all the Firefly units, only the Firefly 302 Plus is able to support.

The Helix Board’s FireWire connection is a IEEE 1394a standard, meaning transfer rates are up to 400 Mbits per second.

Phonic Firefly and Helix Board customers are in for a treat! Steinberg has just announced an upgrade of their Cubase LE 4 software – Cubase LE 4.1.2 – for the Mac and PC. It is now available to all Phonic customers who have registered their copy of Cubase 4 LE.

Q: My computer is reading my Helix Board 12 just fine, but what software would you suggest I could use thats sophisticated enough to read the mixer and record at the same time?

1. Resource conflicts: go to the device manager… then view/resources by type. This will display all of the IRQ’s by number. You should then be able to see if any devices are sharing the same IRQ #.  If so then the easiest way to handle it is to disable the devices not being used during recording and create a ” hardware profile.”  You can search Microsoft help in windows if you are unsure of how to do this. Basically you are streamlining you OS to use only what it needs for recording, and disabling unnecessary component functions which can interrupt the recording (USB and Firewire don’t always play nice).
2. Question: is your firewire port a PCI card or built direct onto the motherboard?  Is the card a multiple device card ( i.e. USB, Memory card, Firewire all on same card)? If you have multiple types of ports on the same card, there can be issues.  We would recommend a PCI FireWire only card.
3. New Computer? If you have a new PC, it can come preloaded with all kinds of useles software, go to add/remove software and check what you have.  If you don’t use it - lose it! then do a disk cleanup and defrag (always be sure to save a restore point in System Restore before changing any software/hardware).
4. Windows Media Center: is a great OS from Microsoft, giving users new functions for audio/visual purposes, gaming, etc.  Some people use it with no problems.   However there are problems among many audio and video manufacturers with this OS.  We recommend Windows XP with service pack 2 or Windows Vista.
5. To continue on from the last point - Windows XP with Service Pack 2 should work great.  Service Pack 3 is another story entirely.  Although many users work with SP3 with no issues what-so-ever, the number of users who are experiencing problems with the Helix Board or Firefly due to this Service Park are plentiful.  We’d recommend users do not upgrade to SP3 if it can be avoided.
6. If the signal isn’t cutting out completely, but the audio is choppy, open up the Phonic Control Panel and try adjusting the buffer length.  Depending on the resources available on your computer, the latency of the audio signal may need to be adjusted.  If this solves your problem, you can either continue with the high latency or try to free up more system resources.  Make sure you ‘reset’ the driver after applying new buffer lengths.
7. While many IEEE 1394B cards will function without an issue with the Helix Board or Firefly, we would recommend using a FireWire card that is of the IEEE 1394A spec.  This is mainly due to the devices being developed under this spec, therefore is simply more ideal.  While many IEEE 1394B cards are perfectly backwards compatible, there just isn’t any guarantee that they will work flawlessly with our FireWire devices.
8. System resources can be taken up by background programs.   Please close any and all background programs possible, this includes any system tasks that are being run (for example, programs like RealPlayer or iTunes like to run their own update programs in the background. If you have the know-how to close these background processes, please do!).
9. Reducing the amount of graphics acceleration is greatly adviseable.  Particularly in Windows Vista, which is a very graphics-heavy operating system, this will take up more system resources than you can afford to lose.  In the Control Panel > Appearance menu, you should be able to reduce the amount of graphics acceleration in the ‘Advanced’ settings.   It may differ between operating systems, but it should be there somewhere.

Though the FireWire return signal cannot be routed to the AUX inputs, if users want to add additional effects to the return signal they are able to route the signal to the Control Room outputs using the “FireWire & 2T Return” button in the Control Room section.  Use the Control Room outputs to send the signal to the external processor, and return these signals through the AUX Returns as you normally would.

If you would like to directly monitor the tracks you are recording in Cubase (or other DAW software - though we’re sticking to Cubase for the purposes of this article), first you will need to set your tracks up in Cubase.  Once you’ve done so, and you’re ready to record, click the small speaker icon in your track details (seen in the image at the bottom of this article).  This button will allow you to directly monitor your recorded audio.  The signal will be returned directly to the Helix Board or Firefly unit for monitoring.

For PC users, this is most likely caused by interference of some sort.  The most common source of this would be from your graphics card.   It is advised that you keep about 1 or two slots between your FireWire card and your graphics card to help avoid such a noice occuring.

Please follow the steps outlined below to check the FireWire connection:

1. Close all other applications and reinstall the driver. Make sure you complete the driver installation by clicking on the “Finish” button before the driver installation.
2. When running Cubase, make sure all other software is shut off to avoid the programs conflicting with each other.
3. Before starting a new project on Cubase, make sure you double check the sampling rate shown in both Cubase and the Helix control panel software is the same.
4. Another culprit may be the FireWire card that is being used. Not all FireWire cards will be equally successful at establishing a clear connection with the Helix Boards. We find the ADS pyro 64 FireWire card with a TI chip is the most ideal card for use with our products.
5. If a connection is lost (in Cubase) you can go to device/device setup and select the VST Multi-track, then select the Phonic Helix ASIO driver. If the connection is lost, you should press the reset button on this page and re-select the Phonic Helix ASIO driver to make it live again.

The 64 bit-driver is available for download at http://doc.phonic.com/. Be sure your computer system Windows XP SP1/SP2 or Windows Vista with all the latest updates.  Please also follow the steps as below to check the FireWire connection: