PCI vs. Firewire

[jzkennels]

I am not a techi, just a guitarist looking to save money from a studio hourly rate, and produce quality music.

A friend of mine came by yesterday and was telling me that a pci card is far better than a firewire, and that the usb2 is faster than the firewire.

I am very confused at this point, as I just purchased the firestudio project and thought I was getting a nice interface, now, as it hasnt arrived yet, am worried that it wont improve over the interface that I have now, which is a usb2.

The main issue that I have with the interface that I have been using is that the latency is horrible. As I do everything myself, multitrack recording is what I use, not a band all at once, at this point. As such, I depend on playback to play to, and the latency turned this bad.

So,,, will what I have work? You may need to know that my cpu is a 3.0, 1gig of ram. I am considering bumbping the ram to 2 sticks of 2 gigs each.

[fmw]

Originally Posted by jzkennels

I am not a techi, just a guitarist looking to save money from a studio hourly rate, and produce quality music.

A friend of mine came by yesterday and was telling me that a pci card is far better than a firewire, and that the usb2 is faster than the firewire.

I am very confused at this point, as I just purchased the firestudio project and thought I was getting a nice interface, now, as it hasnt arrived yet, am worried that it wont improve over the interface that I have now, which is a usb2.

The main issue that I have with the interface that I have been using is that the latency is horrible. As I do everything myself, multitrack recording is what I use, not a band all at once, at this point. As such, I depend on playback to play to, and the latency turned this bad.

So,,, will what I have work? You may need to know that my cpu is a 3.0, 1gig of ram. I am considering bumbping the ram to 2 sticks of 2 gigs each.

USB 2.0 is faster in some parameters than firewire but firewire is still the preferred interface for both audio and video because of its overall performance. Firewire B is already available and its faster than any of them but there aren't any audio interfaces that use it, to my knowledge.

Every part of the computer and its I/O chain contribute to latency. If you have a 3 ghz processor then you have very current stuff and shouldn't have much of a latency issue. I use a 2ghz processor and Vista on a notebook computer and my latency is 11ms which isn't all that bad. I have virtually no latency for monitoring because I use headphones in the interface itself so the computer latency is really out of the loop in terms of monitoring.

Your drive or memory might be slow. If you are running the 1gb of memory with XP you should be OK. If it is Vista then it is not OK. Even the video card and monitor can affect latency since they represent processor interrupts. It is the whole package.

[jzkennels]

I am running xp. I dont know how to take programs off the startup, and have a feeling there are quite a few programs running upon startup. This could be eating my ram, right? right now, with nothing running(that I am using)but norton and firefox, I am using 375 of the ram, and 0-2% of the cpu.