I am considering either an apogee 'duet' or 'one' as a portable interface. I only need to record one track at a time (usually a vocal) so the 'one' is adequate in this respect.

I know that most good quality interfaces use firewire, but Apple seem to be doing their level best to kill this protocol so usb looks like it might have more longevity. This begs the question 'is firewire intrinsically better quality than usb'.

If you are simply recording/playing back a couple of tracks at a time, it's unlikely to make much difference for your needs.

In general, FW offers far better performance than USB when moving large amounts of streaming data around - you will be able to get more simultaneous streams of I/O, or more disk tracks (in the case of FW hard drives) with less CPU overhead than using USB.

(USB requires the computers CPU to regulate transfers, whereas as FW has dedicated chips to do much of the gruntwork. Also, USB is really optimised for the transmission of smaller data packets, whereas FW was designed from the ground up to transfer/stream large amounts of data.)

For audio use, where we are usually dealing with larger amounts of data, this means that generally speaking, FW *is* better than USB 1.0/2.0. Leave USB to mouses, scanners, dongles etc, and use FW for the data. Personally, I avoid USB audio interfaces and would never buy one unless there was really no other choice.

But like I say, for extremely light use, USB will largely be fine for you.

Many thanks for your reply desmond