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Pooh Bear wrote:

lid wrote:

In sci.electronics.design Pooh Bear wrote:

Hi,

I'm interested in passing stereo audio over USB in both directions.

I believe that Windows already has a 16bit driver for this but I want 24bit.
Does this mean one has to write one's own ? It's slightly outside my area of
expertise. I'd aslo be interested in how Macs support this function.

Any general advice about implementing this, recommended chips etc is very
welcome. The quality needs to be high-end / professional rather than consumer
btw which I suspect means using separate A/D and D/As.

Why USB ..?

Because it's available on almost every PC these days. If I was looking at multichannel
obviously firewire would make sense.

Not really. USB 2.0 spec is 480Mbps, vs. 400 for standard firewire.
Either should have plenty of bandwidth for a ton of audio channels (we
used to run uncompressed component video - three video streams - to
firewire drives on video-capture stations, so a couple dozen audio
streams should be no problem).

"Bitness" of a Windows USB driver has no relation to how many bits
you're sampling audio at anyway. My "old" USB-interface Soundblaster
Extigy supports up to 96kbit sample rates at 32-bit sample depths, and
it works fine on a USB 1.1 connection (96k/32-bit stereo audio is only a
little over 6 megabits per second, well within USB 1.1's 12Mbit bandwidth).