firewire or usb

D

djclueveli

New member
this might be a stupid question but what is the difference between firewire and usb? i know what they both are i jus mean is it better to get a hardware that is firewire or usb? i know it depends on the hardware itself but does any of them (usb or firewire) have any advantages over the other? thanks
 
Whether a device uses USB or FW does not really matter in quality.

You are going to get some responses here that perpetuate a myth; that FW is "better" than USB because it's "faster" than USB. I really don't want to go into all the technical details of that whole argument again, I've put out that fire a couple of times on this board already. If you want to know the real details of that whole thing, do a board search on the topic.

Suffice it to say that if an audio device is using USB, that the USB bus will be fast enough to handle what that device is designed to throw at it. They simply don't design their devices to bottleneck in the transmission cable. The same is true for the FW devices.

The main consideration really is port usage on your PC. If you're using a lot of USB ports already, and/or your running low on USB ports on your computer, you might be better off with FW. And vice versa. Keep the amount of non-audio traffic on the audio bus to a minimum.

G.
 
Actually, Firewire can give you bandwidth. USB is limited in how many ins/outs you can have. Although USB 2.0 is technically faster than Firewire 400 (Usb 2.0 = 480 mbps Firewire 400 = 400 mbps), It doesn't really matter because the audio is moving a rate at which it can not get any faster. I always use the highway example here. USB 2.0 will only add more bandwidth for you. Example, you are driving 70 mph on a one lane highway, that is a fast as you can go no matter what. Suddenly, the highway becomes a 6 lane highway, but you can still only go 70 mph. Now, there are just more cars traveling at 70 mph with you.

FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the interfaces are smart and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer, while USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control).
 
The fact is that with audio devices it rarely ever comes down to a choice between the two, unless the capabilities of the two devices one is comparing are wildly desparate in other ways.

And in those few cases where there is a choice between similar capability devices, one that uses FW and the other that uses USB, there are usually far more important differences elsewhere; you know, little things like price, quality of preamp, etc.

It's really IMHO a non-issue. I have used several devices on both FW and USB, and never has the interface type been an issue of any type whatsoever except among tweakheads and pocket protectors who get off debating such issues.

The weakest point in the whle issue might, *MIGHT* be if one is using a USB device and they are concurrently using USB for several other devices simultaneously. Just to be in the safe side I would not recommend carrying that to an extreme.

But even then there is usually plenty of designed bandwidth overhead to go around, and stuff like buss interrupts have not been a problem for me. I've run a 2GHz Celeron laptop (no screamer by any standard today) with a USB mouse, USB keyboard, and USB external CD/DVD burner connected simultaneously with a Tascam us122 USB audio interface with two channels of phantom-powered mic preamp running. We ran this setup on a location recording for over 8 hours without a single hiccup or even indication of a chance of a hiccup anywhere. Now granted I did not try recording and burning simultaneously, but I'd recommend against that regardless of interface type.

Fuggedaboudit :). It's not worth losing sleep over, IMHO, unless the number of available ports one actually has is an issue.

G.
 
Concerning recording interfaces, there is (or at least used to be) a huge difference. At least in the past, USB devices were only able to input or output a total of four channels of audio, while firewire devices were able to do far more. That means if you were monitoring via a stereo output, the most channels you could record at one time would be two. Clearly that puts a USB device at a significant disadvantage to a firewire device that might record 16 or more channels simultaneously. Is this not true anymore?
 
littledog said:
Concerning recording interfaces, there is (or at least used to be) a huge difference. At least in the past, USB devices were only able to input or output a total of four channels of audio, while firewire devices were able to do far more. That means if you were monitoring via a stereo output, the most channels you could record at one time would be two. Clearly that puts a USB device at a significant disadvantage to a firewire device that might record 16 or more channels simultaneously. Is this not true anymore?
Click to expand...
With the USB 1.1 spec bandwidth is restricted, yes. But USB 2.0 is now actually a signifigantly wider pipe than standard FireWire. There are other issues discussed by others earlier that also come into play and mitigate that new USB advantage somewhat, but the fact is that the big speed/bandwidth difference that everybody remembers is referring to the older USB 1.1 spec only.

But that's not even the point, I don't think. The question is, which is better, FW or USB? Now that question has some relevance if one is designing a device and needs to decide which interface to go with. But when it comes to buying a device, the engineers who designed it have already done the homework for you. Does FW have a much larger capacity than USB 1.1? Sure. That's why you won't find USB 1.1 being used in any devices that send or receive more than a few simultaneous channels of audio.

Right now the choice between USB and FW is academic, because there is not much of a choice to be had. At this point in time, larger capacity devices such as multichannel interfaces like the Presonus FirePod or the MOTU 828 will all use FireWire. There is no real choice to be made outside of make and model because there are no such devices that even offer USB 1.1 and very few, if any, that offer USB 2.0.

One the small end, two-channel interfaces like the small m-Audios or the Tascam are predominantly USB, with very few, if any, exceptions. Any of them that may be FW, it doesn't really matter much because the required bandwith for two channels of audio are so far inside even the USB 1.1 spec as to make the extra capacity of the FW a meaningless advantage. It's like walking into a store to buy a gallon of milk and deciding whether it's better to pay for it with a $10 bill or a $20 bill. It doesn;'t matter because you have more than enough money either way.

So 95% of the time the choice is already made for us at any particular level of machine. The high-capacity multi-channel devices use FW and the low-capacity stereo devices mostly use USB. And they both work within their design capacities just fine.

This may be changing somewhat over the next year. As USB 2.0 becomes more of an accepted standard (2.0 was an "unofficial standard"), it might cause some competition to FW, even though FW is fighting back with a double-speed FW to compete against USB 2.0's increased bandwidth. One recent development I found interesting was that even though FireWire is an Apple-created standard and USB was fathered by Intel, Apple has dropped FireWire in favor of USB 2.0 as the interface for the newer video iPods. I have a feeling other companies may start to test the USB 2.0 waters more as well. So will I be saying the same thing a year from now? Will I still consider USB vs. FW to be a non issue? I don;t know; check back in a year from now ;). If indeed there does actually get to be a real-life choice between the two standards, for example if Presonus came out with a new USBPod as a sister to the FirePod or something like that, then we'd all have to see how the new gear actually operates in the real world and where the industry wants to take the two standards before deciding. Maybe then I'll lean FW. But for now I don't care because it doesn't matter. :)

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
The fact is that with audio devices it rarely ever comes down to a choice between the two, unless the capabilities of the two devices one is comparing are wildly desparate in other ways.

And in those few cases where there is a choice between similar capability devices, one that uses FW and the other that uses USB, there are usually far more important differences elsewhere; you know, little things like price, quality of preamp, etc.

It's really IMHO a non-issue. I have used several devices on both FW and USB, and never has the interface type been an issue of any type whatsoever except among tweakheads and pocket protectors who get off debating such issues.

The weakest point in the whle issue might, *MIGHT* be if one is using a USB device and they are concurrently using USB for several other devices simultaneously. Just to be in the safe side I would not recommend carrying that to an extreme.

But even then there is usually plenty of designed bandwidth overhead to go around, and stuff like buss interrupts have not been a problem for me. I've run a 2GHz Celeron laptop (no screamer by any standard today) with a USB mouse, USB keyboard, and USB external CD/DVD burner connected simultaneously with a Tascam us122 USB audio interface with two channels of phantom-powered mic preamp running. We ran this setup on a location recording for over 8 hours without a single hiccup or even indication of a chance of a hiccup anywhere. Now granted I did not try recording and burning simultaneously, but I'd recommend against that regardless of interface type.

Fuggedaboudit :). It's not worth losing sleep over, IMHO, unless the number of available ports one actually has is an issue.

G.
Click to expand...

You still don't address the issue of how the protocol is handled with USB vs Firewire. This gives Firewire an extreme advantage.


While Apple contributed to the development, they are not soley responsible for the IEEE standard.
 
So I know MOTU now offers the 828mkII is both a FW and a USB 2.0 model.
My understanding (which I think has also been touched on here) is that they're pretty similar, and that the main differences between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 is the bandwidth, which is why you can now have a large I/O interface running on USB.

I'm wondering if anyone has had the chance to compare the two. My 828mkII is the original FW version, but I have not seen the USB version. My guess is functionally they're the same
 
jimmy2sticks said:
You still don't address the issue of how the protocol is handled with USB vs Firewire. This gives Firewire an extreme advantage.
Click to expand...
I understand that Jimmy. But please explain how it makes any difference in the end result. This is the part of the whole debate/argument I just don't understand. There are dozens of USB-based audio interfaces out there for which the USB protocol does not cause any problems whatsoever.

If it doesn't cause any problems, why does anybody - outside of the engineers who have to build this stuff - care if they are using Fireware, USB, Morse Code, or smoke signals? That Tascam would not work one smidgen of a difference better if it used Firewire than it does now with the USB (1.1 no less.) It works flawlessly, is no more expensive, is no more fragile, is no different in size, and offers no degredation in performance for the designed specs. So why should I anyone give a rat's ass that it's USB, other than the few PC side considerations that we already agreed upon?

RAK said:
I'm wondering if anyone has had the chance to compare the two. My 828mkII is the original FW version, but I have not seen the USB version. My guess is functionally they're the same
Click to expand...
I did not realize the 828 has a USB2.0 version as well. I just double-checked the fine print in the specs and you're right. There is a USB 2 version with no apparent change in performance specifications.

And so it begins.

I'd bet right along side you that there is no appreciable performance difference between the two machines - unless there is an actual design flaw or unless there is something on the PC side to bottleneck it (e.g a poorly-written USB driver or an overload of the USB bus caused by using several high-capacity stream devices on the buss at the same time.)

But I'd be very interested like yo as well, to hear some first-hand reports one way or the other.

G.
 
Last edited:
What it came down to for me was looking at the ability to chain Firewire devices together as opposed to USB. Initially, USB was being sold as a chainable system without the need for hubs or multi input adaptors. This quickly fell away as the need for greater speed arose. Firewire does pass through, which means I didn't need to buy an extra hub or interface card when connecting my Firewire Audiophile, external hard drive and iPod dock.

In addition to that, I did notice that my iPod dock and my external drive connected and transferred data faster when using Firewire. Maybe it was in my head, but it sure seemed pretty apparent to me.
 
Projbalance said:
I did notice that my iPod dock and my external drive connected and transferred data faster when using Firewire. Maybe it was in my head, but it sure seemed pretty apparent to me.
Click to expand...
Versus which USB version? If they were doing 1.1, then, yeah there'd be a big difference for sure. If they were actually running full-bore 2.0, I'd be interested in a comparison.

G.
 
I use a firewire hub when I need to chain more than 2-3 firewire devices. I'ts just more convenient, since I can choose which devices to have powered up or not. If they are chained you have to have them all powered.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
Versus which USB version? If they were doing 1.1, then, yeah there'd be a big difference for sure. If they were actually running full-bore 2.0, I'd be interested in a comparison.

G.
Click to expand...
My systems in the past have had USB 2.0 and FireWire 400. The current system also has these interface types. The most noticable difference was in the external drive, a Seagate 300GB model. I also noticed that my iPod took longer to connect and to actually begin transfer processes with USB, which I found really strange. Now this is just large bulk data transfers I'm talking about. My printer, scanner, wireless keys and mouse, graphics tablet and midi trigger control are all USB and I have no performace issues to speak of.

The most important issue when I bought my interface, aside from connectivity, was convienance. I have fewer FireWire devices that, in turn, require fewer ports to connect. Since I knew that I would more than likely require the USB ports for the more nuts and bolts functional componants, I chose to make FireWire where I would connect my more "performance" heavy equipment since I knew that would be a lesser hassle to deal with.
 
When we compare USB 2.0, to Firewire we are splitting hairs. For most situations, you will not notice a difference between the two. However, if one is inclined to hook up an line protocol analyzer for the two. I'm sure one will find measurable differences between the two since Firewire was designed for just this kind of application, where USB can work for this type of application. USB ended up being cheaper to build. They realized that early on and immediately started USB 2.0 High Speed since it was comparable to Firewire ( and most importantly - cheaper ).

In most cases, you will not notice a difference between the two. In extreme cases, you will.

I am more inclined to go with USB 2.0 right now because of the adoption issue. Not knocking Firewire, but its been slow to really catch on because of its cost.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top