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Originally Published:
Op-Ed:
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It's all coming together now. In our recent and highly opinionated article, "iMac: The Next Generation", we see clearly that Apple plans to, for the most part, include FireWire across their entire product line. From this, one could only conclude that much in the same way Apple created a huge USB market in less than a year with iMac the same product flood for FireWire is nigh. Well, it is. The biggest little announcement about FireWire is from OrangeMicro, known for their "PC on a card" for the Mac, is a 1394-to-SCSI adapter that will give you the performance you expect of your SCSI drives that just isn't happening over USB. The adapter will only address one device at a time, but you may add as many adapters as needed for your legacy SCSI equipment. What's nice is no termination mojo and plug and play use of those normally finicky SCSI drives. Orange Micro also has a number of new 1394 products slated for release including PCI cards to add FireWire to older PowerMacs, hubs, repeaters, etc. A company called SoftAcoustik has announced their SA2.5 speakers for FireWire (as seen in photo above) that could be very decent home studio monitors for your 1394 ready Mac. It's assumed, but not yet confirmed that the published specs for these transparent blue & white speakers are per pair and are none the less impressive.
Specs look good on paper, but we'd like to see less paper cone structures on the transducers and look more towards alternative or more exotic composite materials such as carbon graphite on the woofers and titanium ferro-cooled cone tweeters. We've mentioned one of our favorite FireWire products, FireDAT, or what ever you wish to call it. MacTell is the first to license this DAT drive from it's manufacturer, Indigita. This DAT drive was engineered with AV in mind above the usual back up usage of tape drives. Sure, you can still use this as a standard high speed, large format back up device -- more over, this puppy streams AV files back and fourth at lightning speeds with huge bandwidth. Able to record and playback up to 3 hours of broadcast quality video or over 100 CDs of MP3 encoded audio directly from a 6GB cartridge, MacTell's FireDrive DAT makes an amazing Digital Jukebox or VCR. At a cost around $800, this drive gives major bang for buck in that the media is inexpensive and the drive & bus are fast. The specs go like this:
Truly a must have once there's a reasonably priced multitrack I/O box for 1394. Another exceedingly intriguing product to be announced is Escient's C200 DVD/CD Changer. Over a terabyte of storage for about the cost of a new iMacDV SE. According to the company, the C200 is "simply the most innovative, intuitive and cost effective solution for the storage and delivery of digital media." Here's the low down:
This righteous box has twin DVD-ROM drives accessed via High-speed FireWire connectivity, with no additional software required. The potential in many areas of use include a home library of DVD, CD-ROM, CDR, CDRW networked simultaneously to a combination of computer and or home entertainment systems. Remember, FireWire is not just for peripheral and storage devices. It is also a network bus. So, if you had a 1394 network in your home, library, school, what have you; theoretically little Billy & Susie can play Duke Nukem (or other educational CD-ROM) whilst mommy and daddy are watching the DVD letterbox director's cut of "Rambo XII" (or other such infotainment), all from the same box. According to a recent interview in Wired Magazine all of Sony's components will soon connect with Sony-branded "iLink", their name for FireWire. Yamaha isn't far behind with their "mLan". If we were to put together an ideal home studio iMac, we would have to go with iMacDV SE, adding the aforementioned DAT and DVD changer, the yet to be seen audio I/O box and a soon to be seen FireWire CD-R/W drive. Replace iMacDV with the new Silver & Graphite G4 and you're ready to live en la vida loca, baby. As always, at least double the factory installed RAM upon purchasing your new Mac.
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Much ado about something. . FireWire!