Audio interface : Firewire pcie ( chipset ) vs usb port ( cpu ). Which will give lower latency ?

[Voyager]

round trip latency has more to do with the quality of the drivers than the interface format at this point. some companies have the resources to write stable proprietary low latency drivers for windows and mac, most don't and will resort to class compliant drivers which are good enough for most applications for most people but not as low latency as good proprietary drivers for any of the common formats such as usb, pcie, thunderbolt, or ethernet based formats. RME largely earned their current market share by consistently offering such drivers for their products and you will notice they were still releasing new products based on the usb 2.0 standard as recently as a year or two ago. Meanwhile Antelope have hurt their master clock business and had their interface products largely relegated to the consumer market for years now based in part on having the opposite reputation.

If class compliant drivers work for your use case (unless you're a pro caliber vocalist or instrumentalist who wants to regularly monitor yourself through a chain of native plugins they're probably fine) and you don't need a ton of i/o a british company that mostly makes multitrack recorders for location and film sound called JoeCo released a desktop usb interface called Cello a few years ago that didn't get a lot of traction in the market but was an excellent value at the original retail price and can be found much cheaper now. the budget clearly didn't stretch to a ux design team for JoeCo but they have a bunch of features and a level of component and build quality you won't find on any other sub $2k prosumer type interfaces that i'm aware of.

Thanks for your input but it doesn't really answer the initial question. My question is not related to how good the interface or the driver can be, forget that, but rather if there is any subtancial latency benefit from having a direct lane path of communication bewteen the cpu and interface rather than having the firewire chipset and northbridge chipset in bewteen and which may add some latency while processing the informations before reaching the audio interface.

[Przemyslaw]

I have dual - firewire and usb - audio interface Motu Track 16. Use it through firewire 400 and pcie card with good Texas Instrument compononents and through usb 2.0 (connected direct to the motherboard usb [not hub]). Apart from differences in dsp usage, perceived stability, ease of use, I haven't noticed differences in latency. I didn't take exact measurements, I rely more on my feelings.

[Voyager]

I have dual - firewire and usb - audio interface Motu Track 16. Use it through firewire 400 and pcie card with good Texas Instrument compononents and through usb 2.0 (connected direct to the motherboard usb [not hub]). Apart from differences in dsp usage, perceived stability, ease of use, I haven't noticed differences in latency. I didn't take exact measurements, I rely more on my feelings.

Is the usb port where you have the interface connected going through the motherboard chipset controller or directly to the cpu ? If you don't know, what motherboard do you have and which usb port you're using so i can check for you.

[Przemyslaw]

I have dual - firewire and usb - audio interface Motu Track 16. Use it through firewire 400 and pcie card with good Texas Instrument compononents and through usb 2.0 (connected direct to the motherboard usb [not hub]). Apart from differences in dsp usage, perceived stability, ease of use, I haven't noticed differences in latency. I didn't take exact measurements, I rely more on my feelings.

Is the usb port where you have the interface connected going through the motherboard chipset controller or directly to the cpu ? If you don't know, what motherboard do you have and which usb port you're using so i can check for you.

I don't know, my motherboard is ASUS x299 TUF MARK 1 LGA 2066.

[Voyager]

I don't know, my motherboard is ASUS x299 TUF MARK 1 LGA 2066.

I unfortunately can't found anything but it seems to me there is no usb port with a direct lane with the cpu but i may be wrong..