Background:

Some of you may remember that I went to a lot of trouble recently to get hold of a tablet PC that was big enough to display a sheet at 8.5" x 11" in portrait mode. The purpose was for using it as an electronic songbook for all of my chord charts and lyric sheets. I eschewed ipads and other tablets because they weren't big enough, and the few modern laptops with big enough screens either did not convert to flat tablet format, or, if they were tablets, they had 16x9 screens that were 13" diagonal, tops, which, due to the aspect ratio, just couldn't get wide enough. The Sony Tap 20 was big enough, but that one turns out to be actually TOO big. I eventually found what I was looking for in a very old XP-Tablet-Edition PC with a low rez 1024x768 screen, combined with some custom software I wrote.

This is working well, and I have now come to depend upon it. But it's old and slow, so it's not really useful to me as an actual laptop for doing actual work upon. Pretty much its only useful purpose is to use as a chart display during rehearsals and performance.

I'd really like a newer PC in that role, so that I can use it for multiple purposes, including to use as an actual laptop on the road, to replace my aging desktop in the recording studio, and also as the songbook display. (It's a real shame the Apple MacBook Pros don't fold over into tablet form or I'd already have one.)

I noticed that Sony and other companies are starting to sell some 15.5" convertibles now. This is the biggest convertible tablet I've seen so far. It still doesn't quite get up to 8.5" x 11" (the 16:9 screen means that in portrait mode it's only 7.6" wide) but it's starting to get really really close. I might be able to live with that, though I'd have to try it out for a while. I'm considering just grabbing one, just to have as my main laptop, and if it happens to work out as a songbook display, fantastic.

But here's what's stopping me.

I also like the idea that any new laptop I get, I can use it as a desktop PC replacement too. Which I'm sure that Sony Flip would do admirably at, since my desktop is so old and slow that just about anything would be amazing by comparison. But there's a problem. I've invested quite a bit of money into audio recording gear that runs only on firewire. And no new laptops have firewire. The one I'm thinking of getting doesn't even have a PCI-E card slot for a firewire adapter.

All of the information above is just background, to describe the corner I've painted myself into. Now here's what I'm wondering if it will get me out of this corner:

Does anyone think that daisy chaining a USB-to-expresscard adapter with a Firewire to Expresscard adapter, and putting that into the firewire audio interface would work? Or is this just too rube-goldberg to have any hope of functioning at all?