Sonnettech Drivers
Arnaude Kubiak
Beyond its support for the Pro Tools Carbon interface, the Sonnet Thunderbolt AVB Adapter enables you to add your Mac as an endpoint in an AVB network and connect to other devices such as audio interfaces, mixers, plug-in processors, personal monitor stations, stage boxes, speakers, speaker processors, and others. Audio Video Bridging support makes the adapter perfect for use in pro audio and video applications where synchronization of data streams is critical.
The basic drivers that support the Sonnet Thunderbolt Adapter are included in macOS. Basic configuration takes place in Network control panel, while configuration for use in AVB applications is handled in the Audio MIDI Setup application and control software.
Product specifications and information subject to change without notice. Computer hardware and accessories featured in photos that are not included with product are shown for illustration purposes; items sold separately.
So after all my issues with Razer enclosure I decided to try the Sonnettech 750ex enclosure. After installing brand new drivers for my RTX 1080 I found the same issue was happening. My web camera keeps flickering and my machine keeps slowing down and I can only assume the slow down is caused by the use of an eGPU. A normal boot should be around 5-10 seconds to get to my desktop now it's about 5 minutes. It seems hit and miss an sometimes its fine and you can tell you are using a google GPU to render the screen. IE mouse movements are crisp and highlighting of text is smooth and precise. Now its choppy and loading a web page is like using dialup and its not okay.
So i have to ask what can I possibly change on my machine to support this setup. My BIOS is up to date. I just noticed my Thunderbolt firmware was old so I updated that with no luck. I installed all the most recent chipset drivers from Dell. I have a 5290 2in1 tablet/computer and I am lost as to why this wont work. I would really appreciate anyone's help to figure out what setting on my machine is wrong that causes this.
Also just FYI I ran GPU burn in test for about 15 minutes called FurMark and my temps never want above 66c and there were no issues with the card. I was worried that maybe the old card was just defective possibly
And Daniel, will a PCI or PCIe card ever work with M1 macs, even if in an external enclosure?
I am asking for the OP, because as far as I remember PCI cards never worked on OSX (hackingtosh) cause there were never any osx machines with PCI only PCIe, so those work on OSX intel. But as long as there are no M1 PCIe machines will the drivers work anyway. Sorry if I am wrong but it would be expensive for the OP if he got an M1 macbook only to find out it will not work with an external enclosure.
I would go with a new one 100% sure. That is if costs would be roughly the same or affordable. Only if money was the issue I would stay on the multi. BTW I have 4 hdsp cards 2 9652 and 2 9632 and one Babyface pro FS. Performance of my BF is equal latency wise, but sound quality a step up.
Hence the choice.
Hey Scheffkoch, I'm with the same dilemma and about to buy the Sonnet Echo Express SE I TB3 PCIe, Desktop, 1, but when I'm trying to install the latest driver on my M1 it states it's not compatible with my OS version. How did you solve this? Thanks!!
Besides a short period of those widely discussed USB issues some years ago on an older intel Mac, I found both the USB and Firewire drivers to be rock solid with most interfaces I tried (Fireface 400, 800, UC, UCX, UCX II, UFX II, Babyface Pro) on a MacBook M1.
Only on the UFX+ I recently had some playback issues. But that was through USB 3.0, while all the other mentioned interfaces work with USB 2.0. I just connected via Thunderbolt then and the issue disappeared.
According to some posts in this forum, some users currently have dropout issues with the brand new UFX III through USB 3.0.
Long story short:
I would either go with a Babyface Pro FS or UCX II, depending on your channel count / DSP / standalone functionality / portability needs. And if you need the newly announced room correction and crossfeed, I would wait a little until it gets announced which interfaces will support those features.
If you're looking for the cheapest solution which will just work fine: a used Fireface 400 or 800 will still work on an M1 on the Firewire Driver, through FireWire to Thunderbolt, and Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt 3 adapters (might sound dodgy, but is a rock solid connection).
It would probably cost you less money than the Sonnet Echo Express alone. It's just a question how long Apple allows kernel extension drivers on new Macs, as they require to reduce some security standards.
I would not recommend the Inateck KT4006 card - it seems to have a problem when the system spins down a drive due to not being used for a while. Then get an error about the drive not correctly dismounted. Have had no drive corruptions issues yet, but still this is not a good message to get on your Time Machine backup disk.
One thing to double check on any USB 3 PCI card is what version of OS X it supports. Have seen some that only work on pre-Yosemite and some that only work Yosemite and newer, so do a bit of research on which ever one you are thinking about.
One note, the very expensive USB 3 cards tend to be more higher performance as they have independent clocks for each port, rather than one clock for all ports. The net result is that the better cards with multiple clocks can run all ports at the full USB 3 speed and the cards that share a clock are limited to sharing that available bandwidth across all ports. So imagine 4 USB 3 drives running at 5Gbps or 4 USB 3 drives sharing one 5 Gbps connection. Depending on your application can be a big difference.
Historically most USB3 cards even generic cheap PC ones worked fine in a classic Mac Pro with no drivers, however from Yosemite onwards and especially so for El Capitan more of these cheap generic cards have had issues.
I personally wanted to avoid any possibility of such issues and therefore bought a SonnetTech card which specifically states it is compatible with Yosemite, El Capitan and Sierra. SonnetTech have two versions of their USB3 card, one with a shared bus for all four ports, and a more expensive one with four separate buses one per port with this therefore being able to run all four ports simultaneously at full speed. (As per the comment by dot.com)
All I repeat all USB3 cards have issues with external hard drives when the Mac wakes from sleep, in fact even built-in USB ports have such issues so I would not worry too much about this since there is nothing you can do about it. As you only mention using a USB audio interface this will not be applicable anyway.
The comment about the Inatech KT4004 is not true of the KT4006, which is the one I'm using in a Yosemite Mac Pro with only the unmounting during drive sleep issue, and the model I referred to in previous post.
What is the basis for your statement about "all USB3 cards have issues with external hard drives when the Mac wakes from sleep" (personal experience or research or articles or ???)? Perhaps you could refer to some place that might explain this problem further and it's cause? This Inateck KT4006 does show this behavior by the way on both spinning type disks as well as memory thumb drives (so my previous comment about Inateck Kt4006 not doing this was incorrect). I don't know why I didn't notice this before, but it just happened a bit ago after I reseated the KT4006 into a different PCI slot to see if it still gets the incorrectly unmounted drive message and did some sleep tests, and so far it hasn't done it except for when waking the system after it had been put to sleep first (I moved KT4006 from slot 4 to slot 3).
But in addition, my issue cause is unknown for now, but am leaning to something to do with when the OS (Yosemite in my case), spins down a drive when it hasn't been used in a while, which results in the same sort of "drive not correctly dismounted" error notification message that pops up on screen. Any idea how to "tune" this parameter that spins down drives after some period of inactivity so I can test for sure? I know where to turn it off/on in Energy Saver System Preferences.
INSTALLATION NOTICE
Important notice for installing the VAD or Core Audio driver on macOS High Sierra 10.13, macOS Mojave 10.14, macOS Catalina 10.15, Big Sur 11.7 and Monterey 12.6
Those recent macOS introduced a new security measure that requires user approval before installing third-party driver software.
When installing the MERGING TECHNOLOGIES RAVENNA / AES67 VAD or Core Audio driver on those OS you must enable the driver software installation as described here.
This should not affect drivers that were already installed before updating your system to macOS Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey.