USB or FireWire???

[BurntHouse]

Wondering if anyone has had any experience with USB audio interfaces - I'm lookin at one with 16 simultaneous inputs and that sounds like a lot for usb to handle (I know they're s'posed to be 80 mbps FASTER than FW but...)

I don't necessarily wanna know which one's better, just whether anyon'es used USB for this many inputs. I'm thinkin it'll choke. What about latency?

[riddler]

I done alot of reading when i was looking for an audio interface and what i got out of it is firewire is the best to use..I read about alot of latency issues with the USB interfaces...Here is a link you might want to check out
FireWire vs. USB 2.0

[jawsap62]

Firewire is by far superior to USB2. I used to run a Tapco Link USB (2 inputs and 2 outputs) on my system and could never get any better than 21.0ms latency.
I now use a Alesis Multimix8 Firewire (10 inputs and 2 outputs)and with the buffer set at its lowest setting i can get 1.9ms latency (10 times better)

Granted i have a pretty good PC to achieve the low latency but even on my old computer the latency is substancialy lower with firewire.

Hope this helps you in you decission (i know what mine is !!!!)

[brandondrury]

Firewire is by far superior to USB2. I used to run a Tapco Link USB (2 inputs and 2 outputs) on my system and could never get any better than 21.0ms latency.

I'm positive that USB2 is capable of faster latency times than 21ms. Was your Tapco USB 1.1 or USB 2.0? If it was USB 2.0 and this was the lowest latency setting there was a major problem with your computer or the drivers were poorly written for the Tapco (or maybe a little bit of both).

Both USB 2.0 and Firewire are fairly similar in terms of what they can achieve in terms of latency and bandwidth.

I don't necessarily wanna know which one's better, just whether anyon'es used USB for this many inputs. I'm thinkin it'll choke

USB 1.1 will certainly choke, but not USB 2.0.

I went with a Firewire audio interface for whatever that is worth.
Brandon