Ive finally ordered a framework 13! whoop!/
I’m a pro audio user and this machine will be my realtime linux eurorack recording rig. I have a PCIe audio interface; RME RayDAT, which I want to use with the laptop if possible.
Questions:.
Thank you for any advice.
Should work in Thunderbolt3 / USB4 enclosure. Thunderbolt creates an extension on the root PCIe bridge. Cards plugged into them get an x4 PCIe abstraction and should ‘just work’ There is some framing overhead but for audio it’s nothing you should care about in the least. UVC class DAC’s work just fine over normal ol USB and it’s orders of magnitudes worse for framing than even an pcie x1 conneciton.
I’ve mainly used thunderbolt3 for Network Cards and it works fine.
I’m not familiar with your DAC but for production/live mixing I’m a huge fan of the Berhringer Xair range, they use a fully opensource Network/Wifi/USB control interface and do all mixing/operations on the interface itself rather fully controllable without any software install on the client.
Excellent, thanks!
the main thing i worry about is latency. Even 40gbps is massive overhead for audio but I need to run extremely low latency with the RayDAT and I’m hoping there’s no kind of ‘translation layer’ between usb4 and the PCI bus.
do you have any device names I can take a look at? I see floods of nvme and gpu enclosures but not much in the way of more standard pcie cards.
Thanks again for the insight.. I’ll keep looking
There are layers between usb4 and pcie but with usb4 they are quite low latency, tb3 did have to split a pcie packet into 2 tb3 packets and then put them back together but tb4/usb4 doesn’t have to do that anymore. They are still encapsulated but 1:1.
Gpu enclosures can take any kind of pcie cards.
The prices for gpu enclosures or the sonnet echo are pretty shocking. I only need a 4x PCIe lane (with racking space for a daughter board).
I would’ve thought there would be a cheap solution 
Cheapest way is probably a usb4 ssd enclosure and an m.2 to pcie board but you are still looking at like 70+$ for that. Also that is assuming you card does not draw all that much power from pcie.
Thunderbolt/usb4 is unfortunately not cheap
Edit:
Something like this + this and some form of 12v power source for the adapter.
It is a bit janky but works, I have ran similar setups to run 10gbit nics and stuff before. Not a great idea to run gpus or other things that draw a lot of power from the pcie slot but like 20ish W should be fine.
ADT-Link UT3G is what I’m seeing as a viable option. Just gotta find a reasonable reseller!
Thanks all
That is a much cleaner option but also significantly more expensive (and needs an atx psu).
I found a Razer Core X for £100 on eBay. RayDAT only runs PCIe 1.1 single lane 2.5gbps. It’s overkill but should do the trick! Thanks very much for all the advice 
That is thb3, so there may be more latency than on a newer usb4 based setup, may still work though.
Edit:
And you don’t need hotplug if I understand your requirements right so there may be an other solution, use the wifi slot, you get one lane of real direct pcie. If you need wifi you can use an usb adabter.
using the wifi might be a bit extreme but it’s a very clever solution!! From what I can gather, latency should be negligible, like 0.01-0.10ms, with Razer Core X & TB3/USB4.
I’ll report back with positive news, hopefully 
the cheap solution is probably just getting a new interface tbh, unless you’re somehow fr using all 72 channels. there’s now USB 2 interfaces that have 18 or more channels of flawless audio over adat. example from popular brand
i assume us framework owners aren’t really fans of shady tech conglomerate monopolies so i gotta tip yall to maybe avoid behringer >>