With Xmas upon us and a birthday today, the thought of giving myself a gift of a new interface is very enticing...   Can a few of the experienced Sonar Plat users chime in on the USB2 vs. USB3 vs. Thunderbolt debate.   I'm sure this issue has been discussed ad nauseum.
Anyway, I know that choosing an interface is subjective, as the price/value is important for a "solo" home user(and its certainly dependent upon one's current computer set up), but I was just interested in seeing the current lay of the land... Haven't seen much USB3 stuff out there, and I'm not sure if stepping up to Thunderbolt or USB3 over USB2 will have much effect on stability.  I currently have USB2 and 3 ports in addition to firewire400.
 
Happy Holidays all... I continue to find this forum a vital resource and I appreciate the time people take to respond
Thanks!

Up until recently I had always used firewire.

My latest one is usb2. It is a Soundcraft Signature MTK. It gives me a 14 in 12 out interface built into a great mixer. I cannot recommend it enough.

I get far better performance than any previous firewire interface, plus it has so much more.

Hi. I do not think you will reach the limit of USB 2 when recording. I have, and love my RME Ucx, which is USB 2. I can highly recommend it. (It can do 18 I/O at low latency) 
Budget? 
I believe stability comes from the drivers written for the AI, and not the protocol it is transferred over. Others may prove me wrong, and know much more about this.
All the best.

I have a Focusrite 18i8 interface and it works great over USB 2. 
 
For fun, I did a little research on Google.
 
USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 60 megabytes per second.  A single 24 bit, 96 KHz stream takes 288 kB per second according to Google.  So the theoretical maximum (by my completely uneducated math) is 208 simultaneous audio streams at that bitrate.  I'm sure someone more educated will come on and tell me it's more complicated than that, but you get the idea. 

You're right, it's more complicated than that . The difference between theory and practice can be considerable, and often the bottleneck is the storage medium, not the USB protocol itself. USB also has overhead. Protocols are written with an eye toward the future, so they're usually designed to accommodate faster devices that are expected/hoped to appear in the future.
 
However most people more learned than me agree USB 3.0 doesn't live up to its potential, but neither does USB 2.0 so USB 3.0 is still faster.
 
When I replaced my USB 2 interface with the USB 3.0 TASCAM US-20x20, I could get consistently lower latency. I've also tested a Zoom USB 3.0 interface with similar results.
 
Thunderbolt is still the fastest; you can get RTLs of 4 ms fairly easily. Which means if your monitor speakers are more than 4 feet away, you'll get less latency listening on headphones than the latency caused by the distance of the speakers from your ears. But, good luck getting Thunderbolt drivers for Windows audio interfaces...Focusrite just introduced their first Windows drivers for the Clarett interfaces last month, even though the interfaces have been Mac-friendly for a long time.

I did the same-ish.
 
I have been using a Terratec EWS88D ADAT LightPipe card for years from XP to Windows 7. No problem.
I went to Windows 10 and while there are no new driver from Terratec, the windows 7 drivers load but operation under 10 is unstable so:
 
I bought myself from eBay an RME HDSP 9632 for $225.00 that has current driver support.
 
- It's so cute!
 

Anderton
You're right, it's more complicated than that . The difference between theory and practice can be considerable, and often the bottleneck is the storage medium, not the USB protocol itself. USB also has overhead. Protocols are written with an eye toward the future, so they're usually designed to accommodate faster devices that are expected/hoped to appear in the future.
 
However most people more learned than me agree USB 3.0 doesn't live up to its potential, but neither does USB 2.0 so USB 3.0 is still faster.
 
When I replaced my USB 2 interface with the USB 3.0 TASCAM US-20x20, I could get consistently lower latency. I've also tested a Zoom USB 3.0 interface with similar results.
 
Thunderbolt is still the fastest; you can get RTLs of 4 ms fairly easily. Which means if your monitor speakers are more than 4 feet away, you'll get less latency listening on headphones than the latency caused by the distance of the speakers from your ears. But, good luck getting Thunderbolt drivers for Windows audio interfaces...Focusrite just introduced their first Windows drivers for the Clarett interfaces last month, even though the interfaces have been Mac-friendly for a long time.

Yeah I figured there's some losses due to overhead.  I didn't think about the storage speed bottleneck but that makes sense.  But I guess even if we conservatively assume that we can get 50% of the theoretical, that's still 100 mono streams at once at 96 kHz / 24-bit.  Plenty for a home studio!
 
This Focusrite article says there's no round-trip difference between USB 2 and USB 3.  Could it be that different drivers impacted your latency instead?
https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208095469-USB-2-0-vs-USB-3-0

rlared
This Focusrite article says there's no round-trip difference between USB 2 and USB 3.  Could it be that different drivers impacted your latency instead?
https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208095469-USB-2-0-vs-USB-3-0

Could be; it may be that it's more a function of project complexity. IOW I can run complex projects at a lower latency with good stability using USB 3.0 than USB 2.0. So even if RTL is the same, the conditions under which you can obtain a lower RTL may be different. This article from Sound on Sound explains why this might be the case.
 
Although my musical projects don't use a lot of tracks, my sample development projects go to well over 100 tracks all the time. Ditto loop library development projects. With USB 3, those projects don't break a sweat, so that concurs with those who say that USB 3 has the greatest value when running lots and lots of tracks.
 

jb101
Up until recently I had always used firewire.

My latest one is usb2. It is a Soundcraft Signature MTK. It gives me a 14 in 12 out interface built into a great mixer. I cannot recommend it enough.

I get far better performance than any previous firewire interface, plus it has so much more.

just did some research on this. This looks like a nice set up.
I love the EQ of the Soundcraft boards. but I didn't realize the USB had multi track support.
Might look in to this more for a future upgrade.

chuckebaby

jb101
Up until recently I had always used firewire.

My latest one is usb2. It is a Soundcraft Signature MTK. It gives me a 14 in 12 out interface built into a great mixer. I cannot recommend it enough.

I get far better performance than any previous firewire interface, plus it has so much more.

just did some research on this. This looks like a nice set up.
I love the EQ of the Soundcraft boards. but I didn't realize the USB had multi track support.
Might look in to this more for a future upgrade.

It is a great board, Chuck, I could wax lyrical about it for several pages.

Apart from the EQ, which is great, there are dbx limiters, great routing, lexicon FX, etc. etc.

You can also send the signal into the computer after the preamps, and then return it through the rest of the channel (EQ etc.) and use the mixer to analog sum.

It is so flexible.

Plus, you get a great mixer and 14/12 interface at an incredible price. The drivers are great and I have been running it with ridiculously low RTL.

It has great build quality, too.

Anyhow, enough now. Apologies. 😊

I do not work for Soundcraft, by the way, but have toured with there boards for decades.