Tonefiend Forum

Okay, I'll respond to my own unanswered question: I FINALLY switched my studio over to Thunderbolt, thanks to the new Universal Audio Apollo Thunderbolt card. I've only fooled around with it few a few hours, but it seems to work great. Sample streaming works fabulously, even huge instruments like big BFD drum kits, the Ivory pianos, and big orchestral libraries. So far, so good.

But damn — $50 for each Thunderbolt cable? (And none of the Thunderbolt devices come with cables — not the new Macs, not the UA Apollo card, not the expensive Thunderbolt RAID drive. Grr.

yeah, I can't wrap my head around why the hi bandwidth serial market is such a mess. Firewire was great, most of the a/v devices still require it, but no-one makes laptops with them anymore - or even with pcmcia slots. USB 3 works great and is common on laptops/pc, but none of the usb i/o devices support it. Thunderbolt sounds like a good platform, but again they're keeping the protocol locked up so only a limited number of 3rd parties are developing/supporting it. With avid and UAD on board, things will shift that way, but until non-apple adopts it, things are going to stay really complicated and costly for users.

So many moving targets. Firewire is going the way of the dodo even for audio, there largely because PC manufacturers insisted on cheaping out on their controllers. USB2 has finally gotten pretty mature for moderate I/O use but USB3 has come along with some backward compatibility issues. Now Thunderbolt, which has great potential as it's basically an outboard PCI bus -- hopefully controller problems don't shoot it in the foot like for Firewire.

And then there's the SPDIF/AES/TDIF/MADI wars.

(It all reminds me of the snarky explanation of the laptop card PCMCIA format name: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.)