actually Jim with the right USB 3 chipset and external drive (not name brand crap) we are seeing 140Meg/s
much faster than esata.

Goddard,
""I am curious about the "hybrid" interfaces, with both FW and USB (like iPods had for a while)), as to how performance differs (if at all?) between the two. ""

RME units: given a good USB2 port the USB 2 will actually outperform (very slightly) the firewire. on a bad port (say a laptop where it shares with the esata) way worse..
Motu shows pretty much dead even. but again the weak usb port will effect as well.
and as mentioned FW/USB perform right there on par with PCIe. (given the right interface) for most the .75ms difference isnt worth the price of admission.

i have tons of "PRO" clients using RME USB/FW interfaces without issue at very low latency.
the % of sales of PCI/PCIe based cards have dropped significantly in the last few yrs.
and many of these (FW/USB) have Adat ports for adding of botique AD/DA and or Mic pres making the need for PCi/PCie nearly pointless.

PCIe is needed if you need lots of I/O (madi) or something like the Motu 424 interfaces or have to have aes connections
NOT for low latency ability.. yes i do have some who must work @ 32buffer and 48/64 isnt good enough for them..

actually Jim with the right USB 3 chipset and external drive (not name brand crap) we are seeing 140Meg/s much faster than esata.

Hi Scott,


OK, with USB3 controller integrated into the chipset (not the case with most current motherboards).   


BTW, You can connect an eSATA bracket to an internal/integrated SATA port... which yields performance superior to 3rd party eSATA controllers.


So if we're comparing best-case to best-case... it's a wash.   

Hi Jim and Scott,

Thanks for the info. Good to know. I will actually be looking at some of the latest interfaces tomorrow, for PC and iPad.

What about the onboard fx, how "realtime" are they really? I read that some fx on Apollo were pretty slow, but I believe those were ones not normally used when tracking/monitoring. MOTU's new Track 16 looks interesting, but perhaps not if reverb has to run ITB as appears to be the case with some interfaces I've read about that split the fx duty between onboard and ITB. Does RME's Babface do that? Hopefully will be able to get answers on that myself tomorrow, and share some firsthand info if I can get hands on.

Yeah, that old newsgroup thread made me chuckle too. Wasn't that the reason everyone started calling their Pete Leoni RYO C300a DAWS "Pearlmans"?

Jim, nope, not Lionel nor any relation, although that name does kinda ring a faint bell from somewhere. Yeah, seen some hairstyles in my time. Wish I still had as much on top as you. :)

Hey Goddard,
heres something even funnier.. that Leoni RYO with the 300As is what got me into the DAW biz.. he used to link to me for where to buy the pre tested overclocked processor (300a to 450)and or motherboard/memory combos.. then whole sytems.. man that was a long time ago.

as far as onboard FX. take this with a grain of salt. i never consider or look at the marketing claims in that area of an interface same with "zero latency monitoring" cough cough.. 

they generally are not much use aside from giving someone reverb in a can. (wet/dry)
or do weird things like disable i/o. (steinberg)

Wasn't that the reason everyone started calling their Pete Leoni RYO C300a DAWS "Pearlmans"?

What a blast from the past!  My second DAW was a RYO 300A "Pearlman" ... 
My third DAW addded a Dakota/Montana cards to the fray, cards I bought from Jim Roseberry, I'm still using them today. 
I'm trying to find someone using the ASrock X79 Xtreme 4 with the Dakota/Montana successfully before I drop any money on a new MB, this MB may enable me to get another 5 years out of the old Frontier cards. 

eric, yeah, fun times those were, 50% overclocks decades before "turbo" mode and "k" processors. And it worked even better once CW revised their audio engine code (with a bit of help fom Jose).

elsongs, best of luck! I'm certain many of us are interested in learning how things work out with your ASrock X79 out there on the new bleeding edge of DAWs.

elsongs, best of luck! I'm certain many of us are interested in learning how things work out with your ASrock X79 out there on the new bleeding edge of DAWs.

Thanks! So far, so good! Installed Win 7 64-bit and just got X1 Producer and have been trying to get acclimated to it (From Sonar 7PE). The CPU fan (a Zalman 9900) was freaking HUGE! The only problem I had with the AsRock was that one of the secondary SATA ports stopped working for some unknown reason, so I just reconnected the drive to a different SATA 3 port and I was good to go.


My ESI Waveterminal 192M PCI sound card seems to work just fine on the AsRock motherboard with the 64-bit drivers. I'll probably upgrade to a PreSonus firewire card down the line when I have the money.