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diyAudio Member
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Mountain View, CA
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Yes, FireWire is unquestionably the superior interface. The problem for DIY is the software complexity - a device must have a lot of smarts in it because FireWire uses essentially a networking protocol. Perhaps a few thousand lines of code are needed, and there are limited open-source options so you would probably be writing all of that plus the OS drivers, then debugging it - it's a very big task for just a couple of people in their spare time.
USB's simplicity is therefore an asset for DIY. The lack of clock management is made up for by buffering on each end, and relying on two-way communication at high speed. In the days of USB 1 / "Full Speed" (what a horrible marketing-ism), there was barely enough bandwidth to handle 2 channels, so the clocking schemes were all badly compromised. USB 2 can band-aid the clocking problem for a single device attached to a single computer, but all the extra speed is no help if there is more than one audio device which needs to work together... keeping multiple devices in sync takes a time-stamped protocol over a fully synchronous full duplex physical interface like firewire.
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- Chad.
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