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my take

Posted by Gordon Rankin (M) on February 28, 2007 at 07:21:12

In Reply to: Firewire question for Steve Nugent, Gordon Rankin, and the other audio tinkerers. posted by Audio_newb on February 28, 2007 at 00:12:05:

Newb,

Ok first off the reason there is no USB 2.0 audio spec is that too many people want too many things. Midi, 7.1, mixing, you name it. It's a quagmire that some silicon companies just don't want to walk in.

Firewire is the choice for companies who make 10K or more of something a year. That is because there are many Firewire capable ARM parts that can be used with drivers to do just about anything.

Oxford is the only company making a commercially available part with I2S outputs. The problem is the jitter on these things is through the roof. You can do a bunch of stuff and get this too work and it is supported to 24/96 on both MAC/PC from what they say.

USB 1.1 spec does allow up too 24/96 it also alows for ASYNC and ISO usage. The problem is that there is only really 2 chips (Both from TI TAS1020B & TUBS3200) available and as I am finding out is a frustrating process over the last 9 months.

There are other ARM parts that are more generic from Atmel that can do the same thing as the TI parts. But the support and stuff to get these to work would take a good chunk of time.

Yesterday I had a little free time and was optimizing and trying out my new dScope analyzer with some software changes in the TAS1020B. The results were very promising. So I plugged the unit from my MAC over to the PC to see how it would work there. Well the damn PC rebooted every time I plugged it in. AHHHHHHHHHH

If you want multi channel support Firewire is the place to go. It just won't be that much quality stuff unless they invested heavily in external VCXO's for all frequencies.

Thanks
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin

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