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RE: Why Firewire has passed away ?

Posted by Thorsten (M) on January 23, 2015 at 07:12:49

In Reply to: 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.

Thor

At 20 bits, you are on the verge of dynamic range covering fly-farts-at-20-feet to intolerable pain. Really, what more could we need?

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Analog Engineering Associates

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