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…
 %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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Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS