Newbe PC audio

RWA Isabellina DAC with MacBook Air and iTouch as a controler replaced my $3200 Consonance Droplet .....which is collecting dust at the moment.
I will keep my Droplet for sentimental reasons but I really start to question present technology and what direction & form it's going to choose.

Musicman, The Saffire is a great little rig. I'm perplexed why the majority here are going USB rather than firewire.

I should add that Isabellina dac is a buid in feature in my Isabella tube preamp.
Mac usb-out •DAC USB-in • iTunes controled wirelessly by iTouch and "remote wiglet" (free download from Apple).

Don't have that much exp. with "FireWire" but to my ears USB sounds pretty good......at least in this configuration.

How would you describe the differences and what gear did you use? Just curious .

Thanks

Cerrot - I have been wondering about the new Firewire DiceII chip and how good it is, as you tout this with almost every post you make. I read the AES paper on the JET jitter reduction and it was very interesting. Well a friend finally brought over a Konnect, so we did Firewire to S/PDIF with a 2-foot Firewire cable and compared it to USB to S/PDIF with a 5 meter USB cable, both 24/96 and 44.1. Not even close, sorry.

Steve N.

Steven,

My biggest issue with going from USB to firewire were dropouts. I tried the utrends usb to spdif into MF Dac 3 and had dropouts (using J River/flac. vista, asio4all, high performance PC, Cayin A50T and B&W 685 speakers, Nordost cables). I also tried a friends Benchamrk with USB and still had dropouts. The music was good but the dropouts were too annoying. Going to firewire, the dropouts were gone and the music was better, to my ears. I have a better sense of where the instruments are and it seems there is more resolution. The music is close but the dropouts were just killing me. (the lack of dropouts definately effects my perception of the resolution, etc. as I can listen w/o annoyances). I also had my sigmatel soundcards spdif out into dac (sorry, left out all into monarchy dip and than into dac) and the dropouts were nasty. Mind you, these dropouts are probably a millisecond or so but just enough to ruin the listening experience. I have had absolutely no dropouts with firewire. After researching, I attributed the dropouts to USB's packet transmission as opposed to firewire's streaming of data. I am very interested to hear others experience with firewire and usb interfaces. Does anyone get any dropouts?