Fire Wire and Six Channel Input - Axiom Message Boards

Does anyone know if the use of fire wire as the standard connection between receiver and DVD-Audio player will provide a better, crisper, sweeter, more accurate, etc., etc. signal than the current 6 channel input connectivity? If so, will it be significant? Thanks.

Phil

At least Firewire or IEEE 1394 is an open standard and not subject to royalty fees. But to become the industry standard is yet to be seen, I personally would rather see ethernet become the standard, because then we can truly network our entire stereo and computer systems together, much like Onkyo and a few others are beginning to do. Although you can do that with firewire to some degree, Ethernet would allow true networking potential, web enabled receivers etc, and with Cat6 1 gb/s data throughput.

In reply to:
At least Firewire or IEEE 1394 is an open standard and not subject to royalty fees.

Actually, for a very long time it was both an industry standard AND subject to royalty fees. Apple charged $1 per socket if memory serves, but has since released it to IEEE free of royalty, I believe.

In reply to:
But to become the industry standard is yet to be seen, I personally would rather see ethernet become the standard, because then we can truly network our entire stereo and computer systems together, much like Onkyo and a few others are beginning to do.

Nope. It's official. IEEE 1394 will indeed be the standard interface for DVD-Audio, in additin to 6 channel PCM I assume:
http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/1202/13.firewire.shtml

Much to my dismay. I have a $2.1k Denon receiver and a $1.1k DVD player that both lack IEEE 1394 connections. I'm sure 6 channel PCM will be more than sufficient though and I'm willing to bet we'll have a crap load of IEEE1394 connections on receivers by the time I'm willing to dump my new 4802.

As to the networking, like you said, IEEE 1394 can do this as well, and it can do this at far higher speeds than current incarnations. Apple's already unveiled the first device (to my knowledge) with 1394b (800MB/s) - the new Powerbook. It also has higher noise immunity than ethernet and it has no limitations to its networking capabilities. It already supports full TCP/IP:
http://developer.apple.com/firewire/IP_over_FireWire.html

Should be interesting. You can get more info here: http://www.1394ta.org/

As to whether or not IEEE 1394 will offer any advantage over PCM besides the number of cables, I think that will depend on your hardware. I don't think it's being positioned as a higher quality connection for the consumer as much as a design consideration for the engineer. It could allow people to buy lower end DVD players without high quality decoders, putting the brunt of their investment into their receiver (as is often the case with DVD video). They wouldn't need a DVD player with high quality DACs and the like which significantly reduces cost. If your DVD-A player has a good decoder and good DACs, I would assume the difference between 6 channel PCM and 1394 would be negligeable, but we won't know until good data becomes a bit more accessible.

Regards,
Semi

Edit: Axiom seriously needs to invest in a better BBS software.

Semi, Is there any mention as to the type of Firewire they will be using? From what I seen, 4 pin Firewire doesn't carry any voltage, where 6 pin does and can be repeated up to something like 150'. I guess Firewire/Ethernet hubs will be more popular soon.

I haven't heard anything specific at all. My gut says 4 wire, but that's nothing more than a guess really as 4-wire is far more common outside of Apple products.

What is BBS Semi?

BBS = Bulletin Board System

UBB and the like are examples. It's a pain in the ass to include URL tags to frame a URL when most autorecognize the URL and do it for you.

Thank you...