Originally Posted by TweakHead
Besides, it's kind of stupid for apple to drop support on firewire so soon, since there's tons of people (like me) who still have firewire soundcards and are not selling them on ebay to get new ones just because Apple decided that thunderbolt is the thing... It really isn't, so far. Besides the Apollo soundcard, I don't see many audio stuff out there with the thunderbolt option. So that's just an unfortunate case of big corporations pushing for their favourite standard, like when Sony has decided to adopt blueray for their gaming console - thus forcing the industry to follow. It's always the same with this kind of thing.
But guess what, we have a hard time deciding upon a good format that would solve the possible bandwith problems that the TI line is facing with the usb connection, now imagine you had to make such decision for the next Virus line. I think the above post makes a very valid point: usb is still the most global of all options, present in literally all computers nowadays, while firewire isn't on some of the new apples, and thunderbolt is mainly an apple thing, still - even though you can get it for intel pcs as well. So it isn't an easy solution for them. Maybe they could do something similar to what Universal Audio has done with Apolo, if it was feasable. But this just shows how much of a challange it must be to have a hardware unit in perfect sync with a daw, streaming audio in and out, and all of that. So much so, that even though everybody recognizes it's a good idea, not a single other company has tried such a thing. And I'd bet that Clavia or Waldorf wouldn't mind having their products advertising total integration as well. And even without it - here I go again - those synths have fewer options then the Virus line, and, even though this is my oppinion, hence totally subjective, I dare say that the Virus still owns it in terms of sound quality, specially the filters.
Since the industry hasn't really reached a new standard with more bandwith then usb, I really don't see them jumping to a new synth so soon. I think the chances of seeing them do an analogue are very remote, if any. They could throw some new totally virtual synth to get some revenues on the meantime, that would be cool, but somehow I doubt it... I'd bet that nothing is going to happen! Maybe they'll have a cake their, since it's they're celebrating 15 years down the line.
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