More than 3USB stereo outs

[LFO8]

Do you think access will ever make it so the TI can have more than 3 Stereo USB outputs? I mean I have a Snow since I did not see any reason for getting the larger desktop seeing as they both only have 3 USB outputs you can use.

So I thought; what's the point. Might as well get the Snow. I wanted the TI for the convenience of the audio over USB (I don't have a mixer anymore and my audio interface only has 1 Stereo input).

Is the limitation of 3 USB outputs tied to the Virus Control Software or is it a limitation of the USB interface on the hardware?

[LFO8]

No one? :( 8-)

[MBTC]

Current TI/TI2/Snow models are limited to USB1.1 bandwidth throughput, so no I don't see it happening with current models. I also don't think it would make sense for Access to put more virtual outs than there are physical analog outs to accommodate them, unless maybe the USB throughput possibilities were much greater.

I doubt you'll see Access adding a lot of value to the current gen Virus line because doing so would be more R&D money spent without any return in sales.

If Kemper gets tired of dealing with profiling amps, it's possible a Ti3 could emerge at some point with USB3 and Thunderbolt as options but I think none of us who have been keeping an eye on Access over the last decade are holding our breath for that one. If you ever see a faster interface like the above emerge on a new model, then IMO more stereo outs could possibly be supported.

[Timo]

USB 2.0 at so-called Full Speed (same as USB 1.1) allows up to 12Mbit/sec.

As a layman, given that Access allow for 3x stereo audio outputs (6x mono channels) at 16-bit 44.1KHz to be sent over USB...

44100 (sample rate) x 16 (bit depth) x 6 (discrete audio [mono] channels) = requires a bandwidth of 4,233,600 bits/second.

Tidying up, that's 4,233,600 / 1024 / 1024 = 4.0 Mbit/second.

I don't pretend to know much about how USB handles data, whether it is possible to use all the stated bandwidth available, but 4Mbits/s is well within the 12Mbit/s Full Speed standard of 1.1 and USB 2.0. It leaves 8Mbit/s available for Virus Control, MIDI bandwidth, error correction and anything else.

It seems very unlikely they will add additional stereo outs at this current stage of the TI|2's commercial life, though.

As MBTC mentions if they release a successor one obvious inclusion as a natural progression would be to include high-speed USB2/3, to possibly offer USB stereo outs with higher sampling rates and bit depths (192KHz/24bits) and maybe even more channels.

[MBTC]

I think one of the issues may be that average throughput over USB varies widely, and is almost never close to maximum. In fact I believe the moment you plug any other USB devices into ports which are shared by common hardware components of a given PC, you are then dividing the max potential throughput by the number of connected devices.

I see the difference between max possible and average throughput quite a bit with things like large transfers over USB 2 and 3 hard drives. A lot of different factors affects the real-time speed including how fast the data is being served on one end of the wire, how fast its being received on the other end of the wire, the polling frequency of every moving part in between and so forth. If you monitor performance of transfers in real-time, you sometimes see bursts of speed that approach theoretical max, but not consistently.

So I can't prove it, but I'm guessing 6 total channels is really pressing USB 1.1's luck.

[LFO8]

I see. Thanks for the replies guys. I was also thinking in lines of what Timo pointed out. Maybe they went with just the 3 outs to ensure stability.