Both units in their stock format sound just fine. Over the years I have owned both and ended up settling on the Mackie SDR for remote stuff. All three of the units have pretty decent sounding converters. Much better in my opinion then most of your low to mid range soundcards. The Fostex does have a cool faceplate that is rmovable, but if you are just hitting record once and then stop at the end and not doing a lot of shuttling or anything then that feature is probably a non factor. Neither unit is very proficient at transfering files to a DAW though unless you buy the Fireport for the Alesis which really speeds things up. If you are recording lots of tracks though of a live set, be prepared for some pretty lengthy transfer times. One thing I do like about the Alesis over the Fostex is that track I/O assignments are made in pars whereas if I remember right, the Fostex only assigns in sections of 8 channels. For the use intended in this specific thread, that sounds like a bit of a non-factor anyhow though.
My biggest copmplaint with the Alesis is the proprietary file system it uses. You have to preassign each new song to a pre decided amount of tracks because it starts reserving disk space for each track. What this means is that if you tell it you are doing a 24 track song and only end up using 16 tracks then it still allocates 24 tracks worth of space which is unavailable to any other song on the mounted drive. This can be a really good thing if you are operating on a smaller size disk, but with disk space as cheap as it is, I find this to be a little overkill. Granted however at the same time, if disk space is that cheap, you should have plenty of it and at the time the HD24 came out, 80 gig drives were considered pretty darned large and were much more expensive then they are now.
One of the things that I really like about the Mackie is that it uses a standard file format for storing the files you record. I went with the Mackie SDR because stock it comes loaded with all the analog and digital I/O, but unlike the more expensive MDR and HDR it does not have its own gui for editing and patching a mouse and keyboard straight into it. My complaint with the Mackie is that it only comes with a USB 1 jack and not USB 2. This means that like the FTP built in protocal on the ALesis, that the transfer of files to a DAW is extremely slow. What I did however (for the very few times I actually recorded to the Mackie since I usually used it for JUST converters) was purchase an RH58 sized external hard drive bay for my computer tower. This allowed me to record stuff on the Mackie to the removable drive instead of the internal drive, and when I wanted to do a transfer I just popped the whole removable drive assembly form the Mackie into the DAW tower, boot up, and then you can just drag and drop folders between them.
On a side note, my Mackie is going up for sale with an RME hammerfall interface card for 52 channels of total I/O at the DAW, 48 at the converters.
