Thunderbolt or USB-C dock, experiences...?

[golemus]

Has anybody experiences of using a DAW laptop through a 1. thunderbolt, 2. USB-C dock...?

- If you are moving a lot then a dock is very handy as you have to only connect 1 cable to the laptop, much easier to dock/undock than connect 8 cables every time like I do

- have you experience stable operation through the dock and especially stable audio interface operation...?


I would like to get a dock some day but it is difficult as currently the most CPU cycles for the buck machines (ryzen) do not support thunderbolt and I am not sure if ordinary USB-C dock is good?


In general audio interface vendors recommend to connect interface directly to computer but this recommendation is long before docks started to come common and USB-A ports uncommon in computers.

[jonljacobi]

I’ve run my Thunderbolt interfaces through a T3 and T2 dock. No discernible difference to direct attached. USB-C is a connector, not the protocol. I’d think that at least Gen 2 10Gbps would give you the same experience.

[BertKoor]

I've had a docking station for a laptop when PS/2 connectors were still commonly used for keyboard & mouse instead of USB.

Don't confuse a Dock (docking station) with a Hub, but most docks come with a built-in hub
Pure docks are dumb extension wires without any logic built in. So me thinks you're actually talking about hubs.

At the times of USB1, the bandwidth required for the audio interface was a significant portion of the maximum available bandwidth supported by the technique. Since USB2 already not so much anymore. For example USB2 supports 480 megabits per second. Reserve halve of that for overhead, take into account a start&stop bit, and the data bandwith is 24 megabyte per second. Four audio channels at 24bit/96kHz take about 0.4 megabyte per second. That is 1.7% of the total capacity. Peanuts!

The potential damage with a hub is that your precious audio stream gets interrupted by other data packages from devices connected to the same hub. That should be no problem, but badly designed hubs cannot even service one single device reliably. Just avoid cheap no-name brands, and it should be OK.

[Tj Shredder]

I have an Elgato thunderbolt Dock running for ages without problems. Every day I attach/detach it at least twice...
I had a MotU Ultralite attached with a thunderbolt-firewire adapter + harddrive running smoothly... (At the moment the interface is connected to my other computer...)