The ongoing conflict between the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire (IEEE 1394) is more than just a war of technology—its about ideology.
The difference for one is that USB 2.0 assumes that the PC is the host in the network and is the one responsible for making changes to all the nodes in the network. Intel and Microsoft are the real backers of the USB technology as it places the personal computer in the middle of the network, as that is the critical spot. The USB 2.0 specification takes USB from 12Mbits/sec. up to 480Mbits/sec., which is actually faster than current 1394 products that run at around 400Mbits/sec.
When using any form of digital recording technology, the goal as always is to create a recording with very high fidelity (high similarity between original sound and reproduced sound) and perfect
reproduction however many times one might record, re-record and play the audio data. To accomplish these goals, digital recording converts the analog wave into a stream of numbers and records the numbers instead of the wave. This conversion is done by a device called an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). To play back the music, the stream of numbers is converted back to an analog wave by a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The analog wave produced by the DAC is amplified and fed to the speakers to produce the sound. The analog wave produced by the DAC will be the same every time, as long as the numbers are not corrupted. The analog wave produced by the DAC will also be very similar to the original analog wave if the analog-to-digital converter is sampled at a high rate and if it produces accurate numbers.
One big problem with the USB microphone is the latency issue for multitrack musical recording; that is to say, how difficult will it be to do tight vocal overdubs with a straight-to-USB mic. Latency in simple terms can be described as the time it takes for a packet of data to be sent from one designated point to another. The problem lies when a recording is made and a track is overdubbed. The overdubbed track will be a few milliseconds off due to the latency issues of the USB cable.
