Originally posted by rooster Sorry Kestral, I have to say what you said about USB was pretty off the mark. WinXP SP2 will deliver firewire info at 400mbs and USB 2.0 will do 480mbs. This means USB is actually faster in this case.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. First of all, I specifically mentioned USB, not USB 2. Second of all, USB 2 does 480 BURST rate. Firewire does 400 SUSTAINED rate. BURST means once in awhile it'll spike to 480 but most of the time the rate is not that far off from USB. Great marketing by Intel to rope the dopes in. SUSTAINED means just that. Sustained. Firewire consistently does 400. Streaming audio requires SUSTAINED rates in order not to skip and jump. So no, even USB 2 isn't good enough for digital audio, especially once you start getting into 24-bit and recording more than 2 tracks at a time.