Are there not decent enough audio recording devices that are USB compatible? I know of and have used FW audio recording equipment and it does work well, but I've used USB audio recording equipment as well that has produced some great results.
The problem with USB audio interfaces was the "Rice Crispy Triplets" (snap/crackle/pop) that would sometimes find their way into your recordings, usually at the worst possible time.
Like all audio interfaces, USB interfaces rely on the CPU to do the analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion. But, unlike FireWire interfaces which have their own miniprocessor chips to manage dataflow across the FireWire bus, USB relies on the main CPU to move data across the USB bus. And, of course, other processes also tax the CPU. When the processor gets overloaded, some of the encoding gets backed up and you get the crappy noise over parts -- or all -- of your recording. That's true of any audio interface, but it was the USB interfaces that tended to have those problems IRL.
But then a funny thing happened in the processor world. Instead of just making faster processors, Intel/AMD/etc. began to develop CPUs made up of multiple processor cores. And the older USB interfaces that used to back up when they were running A/D conversion work on the CPU that competed against the USB bus itself (and that SETI background process you were running) could now be spawned onto separate processor cores, and the cheap USB interfaces that were inherently noisy now sounded OK.
Now, are the FireWire audio interfaces still better? In many cases, yes, in part because they aren't being built to be the low cost hardware. The higher-end preamps, in particular, can make a world of difference. Not to mention better software control of the interface internals. And FireWire interfaces still handle the data transfers across the FW bus far more efficiently than even USB3 (which still relies on the CPU for that work) ever will.
So what about USB3 audio interfaces? Well, there aren't any. At least not yet. And, once you have the buffering problems resolved and the A/D converter process has enough room to breathe, many of the old interfaces will work fine. Again, the difference is more in the quality of the preamps, software control of parameters, etc. I do think that, once USB3 is ubiquitous, we'll start to see USB3 audio interfaces, but nobody is going to spend the money on designing these until they will work on basically all hardware. And, of course, the high-end audio interfaces will continue to be FireWire, or possibly even Thunderbird...
Edit: Sorry to completely threadjack the 2012 MBA Wish List thread.
