Your original question was essentially whether the industry was using an inferior technology to pander to the masses instead of pursuing ultimate sound quality. Well I've been wrong before so it will no doubt happen again! I'm sorry that you find my post insulting but I can assure you it wasn't intended to be. And that he finds no USB that sounds as good as a quality firewire DAC. Barry Diament(an actual mastering engineer)has stated that he has tried all available DACs USB, Firewire, optical. So the addressable market for a USB DAC will be considerably greater than that for a Firewire DAC and this undoubtedly influences product planners, even at the high end. Perhaps in part because of its flexibility USB has become pretty much ubiquitous: you will find USB-ports on pretty much all laptops, netbooks and most desktop PCs - including Macs, whereas Firewire ports are provided as standard on Macs (it was after all Apple that invented the standard) and a small minority of PCs. However as CharlyD says, in practice the interface used for data transfer is just one of the factors that will influence the sound quality, a myriad of other design and implementation decisions will be of equal, if not greater, significance. Several synchronization schemes are supported for isochronous data transfer, including asynchronous (to the USB clock that is) which can be used to implement a scheme whereby the receiver (DAC) can control the rate at which the sender (PC) sends the data.Īsynchronous mode has only recently been exploited in high-end audio applications (most notably by Gordon Rankin of Wavelength Audio) and has been shown to enable a significant reduction in jitter - see Ayre's White Paper on Rankin's 'Streamlength' technology used in their QB-9 USB DAC and JA's review of same in 'phile for more detail. That said, the USB does provide support for several Audio Device Classes and the needs of audio applications were anticipated in its design. Remember, some folks claim to be able to 'hear' theoretical superiority, while others link cause and effect a bit too selectively. Firewire was designed for high-speed comms and bulk data transfer so one could argue that theoretically it is a more appropriate interface for high resolution audio applications.
has a USB interface whereas Firewire is generally confined to high-capacity disk drives, and audio/video equipment. Pretty much every printer, mouse, webcam, etc.
Best firewire audio interface 2018 serial#
The USB is a general-purpose interface (the clue is in the name: Universal Serial Bus) designed to enable the connection of a wide range of computer peripherals.
That such generalizations are incanted by 'respected mastering engineers' compounds one fallacious argument with another, argumentum ad verecundiam. I suspect that these are cases of 'proof by example' ("this Firewire product sounded better than that USB product ergo Firewire must be superior to USB"). I have seen comments on the web, by respected mastering engineers, that state that firewire is audibly better than USB for an audio interface.