28 years of misery searching for the right audio interface

It all started around 1996 the Yamaha O2R had been released as the “industry Standard digital mixing solution”. I was 26 years old had been playing drums for over 10 years and I had to have one.
At a cost of $18,000 Australian dollars it would be the one purchase that started an obsession that till this very day I cannot shake.
It still holds pride of place in my home studio and while it’s in its 20’s it is the fastest most reliable piece of pro audio I own and has never missed a beat.
Along the way audio interfaces, I have owned
1/ a Sonorus STUDI/O A fantastic 16 channel adat card that stopped support with windows NT and the company is now dead.
2/ RME digi 32 8 channels of adat , driver support stopped at windows 2000 and had no 64 bit driver
3/RME digi 96/52 24 channels of adat driver support stopped at windows 2000 and had no 64-bit driver
4/M-Audio Profire Lightbridge 32 channels of adat light pipe on a firewire interface driver support stopped at windows 7 sp1 at least it had a 64bit driver
5/ Focusrite scarlett 18i20 gen 1 with 8 channels of adat usb 2 interface but anything over a dozen audio tracks and a dozen plugins and you had to crank the buffer up
6/Presonus studio 192 usb 3 interface with 16 channels of adat and 10 audio inputs with some onboard dsp we were getting close to a winner but while trying to track a 4-piece band running a live bfd3 plugin latency again stabbed me in the heart.
7/ Universal Audio Apollo x6 [ maybe not for long]
Four days ago I purchased a GC-ALPINE RIDGE Thunderbolt 3 card and a startec Thunderbolt 3 2 m cable
Three days ago without doing my due diligence with all my “acquired knowledge” I decided to bite the bullet and go and spend more money on something that I thought would change my fortune and let me create music without constantly managing resources like doing sub mixes so I would not run out of cpu power or not running plugins on input to cut latency.
The solution was going to be the Universal Audio Apollo x6 with its hexa core and uad2 Processing
Perfect for electronic music and post production.16 x 22 Thunderbolt 3 audio interface for Mac and Windows well so the web site says over at universal Audio.
Only problem is as you can see in my profile I run a Ryzen 1800x which is by far the most stable and powerful pc I have ever owned, but no thunderbolt.
As far as I can gather so far the card I purchased has been hacked to work but that’s not something available to me, or the only other option is the Titan Ridge PCIe card that I cannot find anywhere in Australia.
I work full time splicing optical fibre in the construction of the Australian NBN I earn around $60,000 a year have a wife and 2 kids and I have just flushed over $3000 dollars I don’t have. I tried to return the interface but the music shop said it’s not their fault I don’t have the right hardware.
Maybe my dream, my obsession is over.
That’s why I’m here If anyone out there can help me with my thunderbolt Dilemma please do. I cannot afford a new computer so thunderbolt 3 on my Asus crosshair VI hero is my only hope.

Kindest regards
Plugger

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Hey there Plugger,

Only thing I could find on L1 forums was this thread The no BS Ryzen Thread: All official information on Ryzen here

It seems as though AMD’s Ryzen 1800x does not yet support Thunderbolt 3 and I’m not sure what your end goal is besides getting your Universal Audio Apollo x6 working with your Ryzen machine, so I did some digging here:


Unless I read this wrong you could still use USB or Firewire to plug this bad boy up? Sorry if this is no help… I dabble in music production on PC so I feel your pain. Good luck!

Thanks for trying Grokas .But the support articles refer to UAD PCI-e dsp accelerators not working on Ryzen .And the fact still remains that the Apollo x6 is a Thunderbolt 3 device there is no other interface option to connect to,but thanks for trying.I think the only hope is a Titan ridge card and to pray.

Isn’t their a thunderbolt adapter that could be of use?

No Thunderbolt on AMD mother boards anywhere. And although Universal Audio states the interface works of iOS and windows PC it never anywhere says that it means intel CPU based systems, cheated again by a shonky interface manufacturer .

I’ve heard you can source pcie thunderbolt aib cards in foreign markets through alibaba or whatever, though I’ve never found one myself. You might locate one with some digging.

:facepunch: (bumps fist)

You started this off with the title of 28 years of misery …

No joking here. Maybe you might want to talk to someone about this obsession / addiction.

It involved some… Extra legal firmware acquisition but @wendell has a video on the L1T channel about thunderbolt on ryzen through a PCIe card.

Sorry on a short lunch break and can’t link.more but it is on their channel.

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The Titan ridge controller helpfully comes pre flashed. I really need to do a video on it. It’s plug and play now with the right motherboard and the apline ridge controller.

Hotplug can still be an issue but … better than what I did originally.

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yessssssss

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