Firewire is dead, Long Live USB 3.0

[fraserhutch]

This. Again, the data is opaque to these transmission media. As Bobby said, USA and Firewire and both used for amny things outside of digital audio. the fact that they are data-agnostic is what originally allowed them to be employed for digital audio - as I recall neither were designed specifically with digital audio in mind.
As Bobbsy mentioned A/D/A requires specific hardware totally independent of either of the USB or Firewire implementations.

Nope. Firewire...better known as IEEE1394 is purely a transmission standard for high speed isochronous data. It's totally agnostic about what that data is--indeed, the first use to catch on (at least from my memory) was digital video. Audio followed on later as computer recording became more popular. However, if you think about it, FW is also used for hard disk drives, etc. just to show that the transmission standard is independent of what data you shove down it. Indeed, on my present set up, the boxes handling FW are totally (and physically) independent of the actual FW interfaces.

(A to D and D to A are handled in a digital mixer with an ADAT out which is fed...digitally obviously...to a FW interface and thence to my computer.) The FW on my computer (actually an adaptor in a cardbus slot) handles video (from my old DV camcorder) and pure data (to/from a HDD) just as easily as digital audio.)