very true,
people nowadays are too obsessed about useless things which are just more expensive (Apple pun intended),

audio world is transitioning from digital to IP world, yet majority of network tech is 1Gbit at best, so compared to USB 2.0 which is 480Mbit it's barely twice as capable - hence why those AoIP stuff can handle 128/128 audio channels and USB 2.0 only about 74/74 - and honestly there are only few people who would ever need more, so even USB 3 is waste of money for both audio interface manufacturers and paying customers (and no, there is absolutely nothing superior in terms of latency or performance with USB 3 compared to USB 2, it's all just marketing bullsh!t again)

Intel is absolutely fcked up, so best they could do is to pretend they give Thunderbolt away for third-party folks, but enforcing renaming it to USB 4 to confuse people further,
there is no Thunderbolt 4 actually, even Apple fck things up because "Thunderbolt / USB 4" does NOT mean Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 (!!!) and most reviewers are mislead too,

and in terms of latency and performance, Intel making Thunderbolt open, but not actually that much open, the advantage of possibly direct connection to CPU is dead, so it remains inferior to real PCIexpress in every way possible (except, of course, laptop/tablet connectivity, which is a joke again regarding build quality design of Type-C connector itself)

 

If I understood correctly that's misleading data. HDDs are SATA3 (6Gbit/sec, real limit roughly 550MBytes/sec) compatible just because is the latest standard. But they don't go higher than roughly 200MBytes/sec. And the real USB2 limit is about 40MBytes/sec.

For audio interfaces USB2 should be enough with those 480Mbit. Still, and this is really fucked up, USB2 is not full-duplex so can only transmit in one direction. So if you're recording and playing at once that means less than a half of the real bandwidth (overhead due to synchronization).

Still, that should cut it for most audio uses. But the shocking part (reason I'm nerding out about it) is that the ancient Firewire "One"(400MBit/sec full-duplex) is still quite better than USB2 for audio.

 

Last edited: Dec 5, 2020

Ahhh i see its the duplex thing so for general home studio guys USb 2 should still be oK but i can see the really orch stuff
doesnt cut it Firewire was not really adopted by PC manufactures but thank you

 

The most sensible thing to do is wait until USB 4 and TB4 are well and truly integrated into the MB's, Audio Interfaces and core systems on all platforms, then go about upgrading everything once it's settled.
Sensible tends to go out the window all too often, but the aforementioned logic is sensible though everyone will probably ignore logic.

 

Actually like ten years ago PC's had Firewire support but was barely used. With the USB2 adoption plus some mess with the standard it's almost out of PCs now. Was it Apple's mess? They usually are with these things, have a knack for it.

 

Her work is magnificent.

 

Musicians tend to be the last to get technology at other markets' prices (such as PC market).
I don't see anyone dropping prices because it costs less to make...
They will extract whatever the music production market will pay.
Usually it's a case of vendors bragging about outdated and / underpowered stuff... or it costs 5x the equivalent computer-tech devices.

 

There is no bullsht, i have explained in the past with cold facts and numbers, how usb 3 has much lower latency than usb2, about one tenth of it actually, iirc. Also usb3 and higher does away with tedious usb2 handshake and code headers that further impose latency to device communication. Look up my posts please.
Now Thunderbolt in Intel's implementation is essentially a (gen3) pci-e connection. Because though in every Intel based mobo this goes through Intel's DMI 3, it limits everything else other than the first x16 GPU slot to a pci-e x4 bandwidth. So when users have more tb devices in a daisy chain than a pci-e gen3 x4 connection can handle, they will soon realize that they face a bandwidth bottleneck problem. This is also true for the Intel HEDT implementations of TB3. Interestingly enough is that in the few AMD Threadripper TRX40 mobos that support TB3, even if not officially, TB3 devices get access to a full 16 pci-e lanes... Supposedly next Intel gen will be pci-e 4 and with it Intel will be most likely bringing DMI4, essentially doubling the bandwidth of what is available to connected TB3 devices.
Also at my friend @Xupito, we can always use raid and saturate the ancient by today's standards SATA 3 by hooking many hdds in an array. My small and old Xeon backup server enjoys a ~520/sec with 5 plain Ironwolf hdds in raid 5 config. Of course i kinda hate it because maintenance and downtime is a bitch when it happens, but at least it has proven quite reliable over the years connected to a 10gbE switch which i have yet to reach its max transfer with hdds.
And to sum it, i find computer platform bandwidth was rarely the problem for musicians in studios and live. Latency is the main culprit and "show stopper" and of course incompatibilities and badly written drivers have their share too. I mean wtf Behringer sells umc1820 for 200 euros. Add to this a Behringer ADA8200 for 175euros and u got a 24bit 16 mic/line i/o recording system for 375 euros. But for latency sensitive applications the money you have to dish out is a lot more.
Thnx and cheers

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

The cost of USB3 and eventually 4 should not be NOT be higher in the general market as it becomes the standard, but in the music production market things are different. Things take longer to become standard and still cost more.

 

I was reluctant to bring this up, but now that you mention it...
I'm a RAID0 freak since I discovered it was possible like 12 years ago. That included at some point or another in time:
- A 2xWD Raptor 10000Rpm RAID0 for my Windows partition -> my PC sounded like a fucking Black Hawk Helicopter
- A 3x1GB Seagate Barracuda for documents. Yeah, you can work-around that 2GB limit by splitting the RAID partition at the BIOS level

Don't do this at home guys

 

Last edited: Dec 7, 2020