Hey there... Sorry to necro, and it's a little off-topic, but I do have an Edirol FA-101. I figured I should post my solution to a problem I was having, and hopefully it helps some of you and whoever else Googles for the symptoms of sample rate problem or digital distortion.
I had to change a capacitor on the main board of the FA-101 to fix what sounded like distorted, digital, corrupted, or bit-crushed playback from a computer (but not through direct monitoring). Changing the physical sample rate on the device did not help, changing the sample rate through software didn't help, I think toggling phantom power helped for awhile, toggling digital in switch didn't help, changing outputs didn't help if I remember correctly, changing from bus powered to adapter powered didn't help, and the problem was intermittent for awhile.
To check to see if you have a bad capacitor:
1. Open up the FA-101 (which requires removing six screws),
2. Look on the right side of the board, above where the headphone volume knob is.
3. You'll see sets of capacitors. If you don't know what a capacitor looks like, check out the Wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
4. Check to see if any of the capacitors are bulging, cracked, or puffier than the others.
/////4.1. If so, you will have to replace the capacitor by soldering a new one onto the board. You can find them on eBay for cheap, or in some electronic shops. I had to replace a 10V 1000uF capacitor and it seems to be working well! Just make sure you have the leads facing the same way as the previous capacitor (which is usually indicated by a stripe along the side with minus signs/rectangles)
/////4.2. If not, you can also try removing the entire board to see if the underside or other components looks burned. If that's the case, glhf because I don't know what to do after that :/
Fixing electronics can be dangerous, so don't try this if you're not comfortable doing so (plus your mileage may vary). However, it's not as difficult as it might seem, takes ten minutes to do, costs $6 for a pack of five capacitors, maybe $20 for a half-decent soldering iron if you don't have one, $5 for solder if you really need it (i just reused the stuff on the board) and you save having to buy a new 10-in,10-out interface.
For the record, these things are built like tanks, and I'm surprised the caps didn't blow earlier after being on for months at a time. Plus Firewire is still really fast in terms of latency.