Quote:
Originally Posted by namnibor
@MTBC: You mentioned having a dedicated Bus being a great idea and what I know about the dedicated DAW PC tower I had built and again, from Focusrite Support (really like those bloke), they mentioned that even though the Scarlett 18i20 is USB 2.0, since I have a few USB 3.0 ports that know for fact are totally on their own Bus, just as my eSATA port is for external 3rd back-up drive is on, they stated that since USB 3.0 is backward compatible and a recent update to Scarlett Mix Control fully allows this, could easily run my interface on the isolated USB 3.0 Bus if my set-up changed and the need arose to have other USB 2.0 devices, as to not interfere with either midi transmission/receipt, and of course audio.
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Yes, if you run into any issues, I would try the USB3 ports. My music PC has USB3 ports on the motherboard, but I put a dedicated USB3 card in that PC before I decommissioned it from mainstream use and made it a dedicated music machine. Other devices I have (such as car GPS and radar detector) that occasionally need to phone home for updates were taking way longer than they should to update through the built-in ports no matter what cable I used, so I put the dedicated card in to try to solve that problem, and it worked. So, when I got the UltraNova I wasn't going to even risk wasting time plugging it anywhere else.
But yes, USB3 is fully backward compatible and you can plug USB2 devices into it, just as USB2 is backward compatible for USB1.1 devices. I have always heard, however, that there is a "lowest common denominator" effect with regard to USB buses, such that if you plug a USB1.1 device into a USB2.0 bus, it will limit all devices on that bus to the speed of the slowest device, making another good argument for an isolated bus.
Although I'm not 100% sure if that lowest common denominator problem still exists or was solved via newer bus designs. I doubt too many people outside the audio streaming world would ever get a chance to find out, because USB2 has been around so long now that I doubt anyone has any USB 1.1 devices left over, at least not that they use. And, I'm not sure how many people really have USB3 devices, in or out of the music world.