Fusebox said:
Nope FireWire isnt any better, and you can run audio interfaces perfectly fine off USB2, FireWire 400 or 800. I run a mix of them. Which interface are you lookin at?
I'm sorry but this statement is incorrect.
Firewire is better for recording audio and here's why.
USB devices are asynchronous, which means that any device has the power to send any amount of data at any time. If two devices decide to talk at once, their data can collide with each other. If the traffic's not highly time-sensitive, this isn't a big deal. There are routines in place to manage it, and you'll never notice if your mouse click happens a couple microseconds later. BUT. There are a few applications where it matters, and one of them is audio. An audio interface is sending a constant stream of sound data back to the computer. It rarely uses up the whole pipe, and so it's still possible for other devices to talk but the odds of collisions are higher, and if you get too much other traffic the errors can pile up beyond the computers ability to stay caught up and you lose some sound data.
Firewire is a peer-to-peer protocol, meaning that every device on a Firewire network is equally capable of talking to every other device. Two video cameras on a Firewire network can share data with each other. A Firewire audio interface could save sound data directly to a Firewire hard drive. 3 Your computer is just another peer on this network, and has no inherent special status.
But the real reason Firewire is more reliable than USB is more fundamental than that. It's because Firewire allows two operating modes. One is asynchronous, as we described above with USB. The other is isochronous mode, and it lets a device carve out a certain dedicated amount of bandwidth that other devices can't touch. It gets a certain number of time slices each second all its own. The advantages for audio should be obvious: that stream of data can just keep on flowing, and as long as there isn't more bandwidth demand than the wire can handle (not very likely) nothing will interfere with it. No collisions, no glitches.
USB = chain, Firewire = dedicated bandwidth.
Firewire for Audio = a good thing.
USB for audio = not so good.