[LAU] Anyone used a Firewire-to-USB3 or ESATA adapter?

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 16 April 2014 08:55:55 david did opine:

> My church has a 16-channel Presonus Firewire device that we're not
> currently using because (1) my laptop has no Firewire connector (the
> dead old one did), and (2) our sound tech's laptop has Windows 7 on it
> and apparently there's no Windows 7 device driver for his Firewire PC
> Card adapter.
> 
> So I thought, maybe a Firewire<->USB adaptor would work. All we used the
> Presonus for is recording individual channels. Now I just record 2
> channels of essentially-mono output from our mixing board, but I very
> much miss the ability to clean up and EQ individual instruments and mix
> them better (the volunteer sound people who frequently run our mixing
> board don't exactly have the greatest ears, plus the acoustics in our
> rented location aren't the best).
> 
> My laptop has USB2 and USB3, plus an ESATA port.
> 
> I see Amazon has a selection:
> 
> Firewire to USB
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A172282%2Ck%3Afirewire%20to
> %20usb%20adapter
> 
> Amazon doesn't seem to show a Firewire-ESATA adaptor.
> 
> For desktop folk, they list this PCIe card (2 external ESATA, 2 external
> Firewire800/1394B, 1 internal 1394B, runs TI XIO2213 chipset):
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/NitroAV-Fusion-FireWire800-Professional-Adapter/dp
> /B0055PG0KE/ref=sr_1_6?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1397633174&sr=1-6&keywo
> rds=firewire+to+esata+adapter
> 
> Unfair: There's an Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter! I guess that
> will be enough to keep Firewire alive in the pro audio world.

Apple owns the patent rights to firewire.  Went thru all the motions of 
publishing the specs, waited for it to take off, then decided they needed a 
per port royalty fee that was more than the hardware cost.  Firewire 
disappeared almost overnight.

I have some firewire stuff, a Sony Digital Hi-8 Handy-Cam.  But when I 
built this machine back in 2008, a quad core phenom on an almost $300 ASUS 
motherboard, I had to go find a firewire card to put in it before I could 
use kino to take in the camera, edit out the worst of my shakes, and make 
dvd's out of it for all the parties involved in that wedding (and a couple 
more since). So that tells you that as far as the motherboard makers were 
concerned, firewire had priced itself out of the market already 6 years 
ago.

Cheers, Gene
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