Re: X32 Discussion
My understanding has been that the reason people favored Firewire over USB for audio recording is that USB suffers from the lack of a "traffic cop"/controller...essentially operating something like an ethernet hub (not a router). In a hub operation, all attached devices vie for access to the hub. When 2 devices try to access at the same time, they detect the "data collision" and both shut up for some time period then re-attempt to access the hub. It's these collisions and "reset" times (I dont know the actual technical term) that make USB slower than Firewire which does have an active traffic cop type controller.
I think I'd also read somewhere that USB has to access hardware level stuff (real memory, disk drives etc...) via a pci interface layer whereas Firewire could do direct memory access and directly read/write to hard drives. Not sure about this though.
I use a laptop that has USB 2.0 and a Firewire adapter card slot. The Firewire link is exceptionally fast (I use this to run an RME Digiface that talks to 24 chan's of higher end mic pre's via ADAT....this setup will get me absolute minimum buffer settings and round trip latencies down in the 3ms range). The firewire adapter card is, however, something of an extra hassle. Since getting the x32 I've been using the USB connection, with moderate/middle of the road buffer settings, and it's worked perfectly.
I'm not using this setup in a situation where I have to both record AND return audio to the console via USB so I cant comment on how solid the USB connection would be if you tried doing this with large numbers of chan's being recorded.
Lastly, Apple's dropped Firewire, many PC's come with built in firewire adapters but lots of them use non TI (Texas Instruments) chipsets and many audio app's/drivers apparently do not like the non TI chipset's. Also, on many PC's, if it runs Win 7 there apparently was some problem with the WIN7 Firewire driver (lot's of user forum hit's on this) and many audio app's recommend you switch to the Windows "Legacy" firewire driver.
Sorry for the lengthy post but, though it's been a few years since I had to get deep into these things, I went through massive amounts of this stuff when I built my studio DAW tower (Quad Core Intel I5, Win7 64 bit, 16 gig ram, RME multiface/Digiface audio adapter, 180 gig SSD C drive, 6 hard drives organized as 3 Raid 0 array's (one array is a pair of Raptor 10k rpm drives used for project files/audio, the other two are for streaming sample storage..NI Komplete, BFD2 , Omnisphere, Trillian....lots of stuff, dual 26" monitors on fan-less (silent) video cards (can accommodate up to 4 monitors if I ever had need for that???)
