Cleary, the portability and 'moveability' features of firewire and USB are attractive.
#Usb vs firewire audio interface drivers
I've been recently hearing that Presonus has improved its drivers significantly especially for those brave enough to use MS Vista at this point.Įxcellent info, that does explain a lot about the reasons why there seems to be more abundant firewire options than USB. I'm not sure what DAW Application you're planning on using but for Sonar, Edirol, MOTU and Echo firewire products have the lowest measured round-trip latency interfaces/drivers. But once the track count starts to increase - soft synths, and other plugz your CPU will take a larger hit and can cause dropouts, static, clicks etc. Not a big deal if you have enough power and aren't using many plug-ins. If your motherboard doesn't use TI chipsets you can buy a PCI Firewire card for around $45 with TI Chipset. To avoid Chipset/driver issues make sure to use firewire with TI (Texas Instruments) chipsets. IOW - Firewire uses it's own chipset to process throughput rather than utilizing your CPU. But Firewire will avoid this as it's a peer to peer connection. There are some good USB interfaces out there. Something else to keep in mind - is that USB uses your CPU power and "steals" cycles.
#Usb vs firewire audio interface install
I do have USB 2.0 ports built into my machine, but I only have a firewire PCI card that I could install into it (no firewire native) which might be sketchy and could rule out firewire interfaces, not sure. If this is the case and if I can get really nice mic pre's in a PCI format, then I might take this route. But there's no question that the performance with PCI is higher: You don't have the additional ms or two of latency added on by going through FireWire, and of course, there are no issues of possible noise traveling down the FireWire or USB connection." A PCI card does require opening up your computer, and isn't as "transportable" as just unplugging a USB or FireWire cable and plugging it into a different machine. "So is this a better move than a FireWire or USB interface? That depends on your application. So, would you agree with what the author says here? no need for portability, only one nice machine with good specs for digital audio). There's no question that the ease of use of firewire and USB is VERY attractive, but even so my recording rig is stable (ie. In doing research I came across a good review of the EMU 1616 interface which made me question latency issues between firewire, USB and PCI.
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