It probably boils down to cost. Firewire is all but dead (try finding a laptop with a FW port, let alone a PC). At 450Mbps USB 2.0 is as fast (although argumentably not as stable) as FW400. USB is on a licensing scheme, i.e. you need to pay somebody money if you plan on developing a USB device. No doubt that fee is higher for 3.0 than it is for 2.0.
So short of a great market demand, everyone is putting maybe one or two USB 3.0 ports in their systems (quite frankly the only devices really benefitting from 3.0 at current are external hard drives and how many do you want to hook up at once?) and the rest 2.0, which is plenty for just about anything else.
I don’t expect to see any big changes in that shortly. As you correctly noticed, the new “standard” has been out for a while and has not replaced 2.0 yet.
So, if you want a new audio device there are effectively three ways to go:
- Firewire 400/800, although it is increasingly difficult to find machines that have a FW port and/or a card to stick in your machine to do the honors. Most “serious” brands are now putting out USB versions before FW versions, if at all.
- USB 2.0, which should give you enough bandwidth, provided you use one single port directly on your PC (usually there are two ports connected to a single internal hub, so picking one of two and keeping the other empty will help give you the max. bandwidth).
- There are some brands that have sound cards that you stick into your PC and that have a breakout box for all your inputs/outputs. Proprietary hardware that doesn’t use either FW or USB, but talks directly to the computers internal busses (EMU for example).
Last word, most of the more (semi)professional sound cards will have a number of inputs as they are mostly geared towards recording/home studio use. So unless you stick with a specific DJ brand you’ll get (more) inputs you won’t be using.
Greetinx,
C.
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