Like the title says. I was recently gifted an ancient mixer that should be multi channel class compliant on Mac osx (so says the manual), the only problem is, it's 1394 firewire 400 and NOT USB.
I recently built a sleeper PC in which the case has a front panel 1394 jack, but I can't use it with a USB header because one standard uses 5v on one set of pins and the other uses 12v on another set of pins, so you could fry whatever you plugged into it if you had a 1394 jack plugged into the USB header on a motherboard or vice versa.
The reason I mentioned this, is because I know there are USB to FireWire converter cables available on Amazon for camcorders and older hard drives. Regardless of whether or not the mixer I have is class compliant, would using one of these cables FRY the USB ports on maschine plus? Or am I fine because it's just audio data?
Just for the record, I'm going from female 1394 to the USB on the plus with a male 1394 cable to male USB cable like below.
For a free mixer and the cost of a 10 dollar cable id really like to give the mixer a shot over USB for the plus, but not if I'm gonna fry a jack.
The mixer is an odd brand ive never heard of. It's a Phonic helix board 18 FireWire mkII. You can still find the product page (with manual) on zzounds if you Google it.
Even if I can't use it multi channel, I'll at least FINALLY have a mixer big enough to handle all my synths and can finally ditch my Roland go mixer pro x which I outgrew years ago. I'd be going from stereo over USB to stereo over XLR if I can't use the fire wire, which I'm alright with.
I know there are quite a few in here who have used FireWire back in the day, so hopefully someone here will know for sure. Otherwise I might start up an ancient Chromebook I have still after I get the adapter to test it on something I don't care about. Or maybe one of the old dell towers from the 90's I have laying around. I grew up with FireWire on the colorful CRT imac's in school but admittedly I've never used them for music production.
Thank you!
