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In Reply to: RE: Why Firewire has passed away ? posted by beppe61 on January 19, 2015 at 23:16:21
Hi,
> i do not understand why they have stopped to use firewire in
> audio dacs.
I do. Back when we developed the DP-777 we originally intended it to support both Firewire and USB 2 with Asynchronous USB Audio Class 2.
We evaluated a number of firewire solutions, non of which was turnkey, all of which would have meant substantial fees to fit our application and had massive engineering lead times. Think 9 month development time and an extra zero on the software engineering cost from buying their plain vanilla firmware (no source code provided, no modification by us possible).
Non of the solutions was asynchronous at the time either (this was one of the mjor delay/cost sources). All were targeted at multi-channel pro audio. There was a massive cost overhead for those features while they had no use for 2-Channel audio. Testing across a variety of Platforms, the system reliability was not great, some Firewire controllers embedded in PC's, Mac's and Laptops had serious compatibility issues. In the end we decided that having Firewire was not important enough to have to spend the effort, money and time, so this was dropped. Casework for the DP-777 still has the slot at the back in the inner chassis that was supposed to have held the two FW sockets and one USB.
By comparison the USB Solution we tested and adopted came with a great development environment and the source code for a solid working solution, allowing us to customise this to our need ourselves and had much lower implementation cost.
And to add insult to injury, it significantly outperformed ALL the firewire solution on jitter as they were running in adaptive mode (in effect like earlier versions of USB) while it was asynchronous and it was extremely solid for both the drivers offered and the firmware.
This was long before even Sony and Apple dropped hardware support for Firewire in their PC's and Laptops (though others were already omitting firewire).
We still use QC audio testing systems based around firewire Pro-Audio Sound Cards. It is expensive to keep them running as fewer and fewer PC hardware supports Firewire and we have to keep a spare units as the firewire chipsets seem to blow up.
We are phasing them out and have instead designed a custom test system based around USB. It again performs better than the old firewire hardware and is more reliable in use.
If we look "under the bonnet" there is nothing in firewire that gives it a real advantage over USB.
Neither USB 2 nor Firewire include galvanic Isolation.
Both allow "asynchronous mode"
Both are bidirectional, packet based communication interfaces with similar practical throughput (USB vs FW800).
Overheads on the host PC during operation are also similar.
USB 2 has universal support on any OS and any computer hardware released in the last decade or more, there are several vendors with USB Audio solutions of varying capability and with good support.
I can see FW800 making a difference in pro-audio if very large numbers of channels at very high sample rates are needed, but the current most common Pro-Audio Multichannel Interface (MADI) is slower than USB 2.
In the end the main reason Firewire died out was the Market deciding that it was too expensive, had too limited support for hardware and software and offered few if any real advantages over USB 2.
Ciao T
At 20 bits, you are on the verge of dynamic range covering fly-farts-at-20-feet to untolerable pain. Really, what more could we need?
Follow Ups:
Don't know if this article is true, but I suspect it is. Hot plugging Firewire devices is specified to be safe (no damage to hardware when connecting or not connecting), but in fact some implementations do not have the necessary protection and if you don't power down your equipment before connecting or disconnecting Firewire cables, then you may get chip failures.
In other words, some (most?) Firewire implementations are junk.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
. . . is that firewire devices which do NOT adhere to to the IEEE 1394 standard MIGHT have problems. Is that most of them?
In any case, I used to have the Pioneer FW implementation (between their universal players and their receiver) up until about five years ago, where the connection carried the data for all 5.1 channels at up to 24/192. I didn't encounter problems. Just anecdotal and it could be just my luck - but then I never had any FW problems with any of my Macs that had FW ports either. (And that was a lot of hard drives - sometimes daisy-chained rather than connected via a FW hub.)
I don't know what fraction of Firewire devices fail on hot plug. It probably depends on the electrical environment in the boxes and in the power wiring (e.g. ground loops, static electricity). I had one Firewire device blow up years ago, but it was in an ancient machine (c. 1998) that was a POS. I have yet to have a problem with any USB 2.0 devices.
Firewire works with my Mytek DAC, but I don't use it, because USB seems to work better. I connect the Firewire cable only to flash firmware, since there is no way to reflash the Mytek firmware over USB. Preferences are going to depend on all the software involved, including O/S, driver, driver interface, player software, DAC firmware, so YMMV. There are also various parameter settings associated with each of the above and these can interact in ever more complex fashions... So it may be that there is a different magic incantation that would make my hardware work better with Firewire, but I have stopped looking for it.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Hi Mr Loesch,
thank you very much indeed for the extremely useful explanation and advice
I understand now that USB is perfectly fine and this is what i will stick with for long time
Of course the original 1.0 was maybe limited but now with the 3.0
Do you think that placing in the desktop a pci card usb could give any benefit ?
these additional ports will have a dedicated controller and the card are very cheap
Thanks again.
Kind regards,
bg
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