Thunderbolt I/O

[Shi7Disc0]

Has anyone heard upcoming news about possible audio interfaces with thunderbolt connectors?

-Would be a great sell on staying brand loyal to macs for a daw setup.

USB 2.0 maxed out at a theoretical 480Mbps, while USB 3.0 can theoretically handle up to 5Gbps.

Apple claims up to 10gbps both ways.

"Thunderbolt I/O technology gives you two channels on the same connector with 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions. That makes Thunderbolt ultrafast and ultraflexible. You can move data to and from peripherals up to 20 times faster than with USB 2.0 and up to 12 times faster than with FireWire 800." -Apple Co.

Thoughts?

 

[MaxOfMetal]

I believe the target market for Thunderbolt is video editing. Much larger file sizes these days as definition gets better and the average television and computer monitor keeps growing in size.

Audio on the other hand is still most popular in relatively "small" formats, such as MP3. I do see audiophiles possibly being interested.

 

[Thep]

PC will recieve thunderblot next year.

But when 1TB of storage costs 400 bucks, on top of a computer with a hearty SSD, and it being bottlenecked by any computer peripheral device on the market, I don't see it taking off anytime soon.

As far as audio is concerned, its not relavant.

 

[MF_Kitten]

i can definitely see it being relevant, considering you could get many more channels in at the same time, compared to firewire.

there's also talk about external GPUs that you just plug in.

 

[nojyeloot]

^1TB of storage, internal or external, (omitting SAS/SCSI drives) are well under $400 now brohem.

But yes, SSDs are super pricey and there's some serious bottle necking right now. So ya, won't be of much use to the general public anytime soon.

 

[Winspear]

I don't know..I'm not sure of the tech specs but I'm sure Firewire can handle around 30 or something tracks if not more?? And I think anyone with bigger rigs than that is running a hardware PCI card or PT rig etc and wouldn't really care about USB type functions.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

But when 1TB of storage costs 400 bucks.

Yeah......a couple years ago.

1TB USB 2.0
Newegg.com - Verbatim 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive 96571

This is what $400 can buy you these days:

4TB USB 2.0
Newegg.com - BUFFALO DriveStation Quad 4TB USB 2.0 / eSATA Black External Hard Drive 4-drive RAID Storage HD-QL4TSU2R5

2TB USB 3.0
Newegg.com - ioSafe Rugged 1TB USB 3.0 Black Portable External Hard Drive with 3 year Data Recovery Service Special Edition PA51000UB3YR

 

[mgh]

absolutely right, unless you're recording a big live gig and needing 50 recording channels, this isn't an issue of bandwidth. however, if it gives rock solid low round trip latency then we will all be interested - SoS mag PC notes discusses this this month, and there are some manufacturers interested in using the Ethernet port on your pc, and getting <1ms latency...now that's worth it!

 

[Shi7Disc0]

i can definitely see it being relevant, considering you could get many more channels in at the same time, compared to firewire.

there's also talk about external GPUs that you just plug in.

Thats a really badass idea. Would make upgrading super easy.....maybe too easy.

 

[tr0n]

I'm not sure Thunderbolt is really necessary unless you're a big facility, particularly a video facility like MaxOfMetal mentioned. I hear these kind of places are even looking into cloud based solutions for operations too.

Firewire 800 is a massive bandwidth already and if you crunch the numbers down it can handle a tonne of tracks simultaneously. The bottleneck now is indeed hard drive write-speed and bus-speed.

 

[Shi7Disc0]

PC will recieve thunderblot next year.

But when 1TB of storage costs 400 bucks, on top of a computer with a hearty SSD, and it being bottlenecked by any computer peripheral device on the market, I don't see it taking off anytime soon.

As far as audio is concerned, its not relavant.

Thanks. I didn't know that was hitting the PC market, and I was kind of complacent as to wether it would really takeoff or not because of USB 3.0 being rather new.

Also, if you are referring to bottlenecking through the actual recording interface, I guess I didn't consider the speed of the A/D-D/A conversion.

 

[Thep]

Thunderbolt harddrive max, this is a thunderbolt discussion.

LaCie 1TB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Hard Drive (7200 rpm) - Apple Store (U.S.)

 

[KingAenarion]

I don't know..I'm not sure of the tech specs but I'm sure Firewire can handle around 30 or something tracks if not more?? And I think anyone with bigger rigs than that is running a hardware PCI card or PT rig etc and wouldn't really care about USB type functions.

I actually ran some tests on my Fireface UFX and we got 30 tracks In and 30 out with a buffer of 256 without interrupts or pops/clicks on firewire. We had to up that to about 1024 on USB before we got absolutely none.

Also, USB3.0 still suffers from the same problems as previous versions of USB in that it's host controlled. So if you're computer decides that the USB slot is not as important as something else then hello pops/click.


The Apogee Symphony Thunderbolt I/O card option is supposed to arrive very soon (within a couple of months from what I was told recently).