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Re:The new Mac Pro: The audacity to say “Yes” in a design cu... by Sanddancer on Saturday April 15, 2017 @11:39PM (#14124203)
It may be a pain to only use one connector, but the protocol itself compared to a lot of external busses is a lot nicer. One of the big things ethernet gives is a lot lower latency. The ear is pretty latency-sensitive, with voice latency of 15 milliseconds being a threshold where most people can start noticing. Because of the polling nature of USB, you've got to wait for the bus to ask for data, which means you're going to have at least a couple of milliseconds of latency. Also, because Ethernet is a many-to-many protocol, you can do things like have the synchronization clock on the same connection as data, so you don't need to run a million clock cables along with your data cables.
Re:The new Mac Pro: The audacity to say “Yes” in a design cu... by jjoonathan on Sunday April 16, 2017 @12:31AM (#14124329)
Sure you don't have that backwards? USB 2+ has isochronous transfers with guaranteed bandwidth and latency that come with guaranteed start-of-frame timing strobes every 0.125ms with a jitter spec much better than that. Ethernet... doesn't.
Re:The new Mac Pro: The audacity to say “Yes” in a design cu... by Sanddancer on Sunday April 16, 2017 @02:41AM (#14124688)
It depends on the type of USB audio device. USB MIDI devices, for example, use bulk transfers because they need reliable communications to handle things like sysex sends. Additionally, Ethernet, through the AVB suite [1] does have time reservation, synchronization, and other things that are very useful in dealing with realtime data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging

Re:The new Mac Pro: The audacity to say “Yes” in a design cu... by Dylan16807 on Sunday April 16, 2017 @12:18AM (#14124302)
> Because of the polling nature of USB, you've got to wait for the bus to ask for data, which means you're going to have at least a couple of milliseconds of latency.

That's up to the driver. USB 2.0 can poll at up to 8kHz. USB 3 is harder for me to find exact numbers on but it has more flexible timing and can go even faster.