I have a 2408mk3 and am very happy with it. It replaced an echo mia card - and the sound is definitely better (better sterio immage, tighter sound, etc.).
I havent personally compared it to the ardvark units, but I asked lots of questions on different forms to try to talk to ones that had compared them (as you are doing).
This is some of what I found.
John Mayes said this of his motu 828mkII (similar sound quality to the 2408mk3)
"Im also using one of these units. the A/D converters are light years better sounding than the ones in my old Echo Mona Units. The onboard pre's are not bad at all...in fact they are very smooth and warm sounding. There are tons of features of which I have not yet explored but all in all this unit is GREAT! "
If you check on this form (search for echo mona) you will see that John Mayes sold his mona units. The mona has slightly better sound than the delta 1010.
On another forum I posted this question . . .
I am looking at getting a 8 in 8 out card. Does anyone know how the sound of the 2408mk3 would compare to say the layla24 delta 1010,
digi 002 rack, q10, etc?
This was one of the responses . . .
"I have
the 2408 mkIII. Its a very nice piece of hardware. I'm using it with behringer's DDX3216 digital mixer as a front end through the optical banks. Altough most of my stuff is converted A/D on the mixer, I've used the analog I/O on the 2408. The sound quality is, in my personal taste, in the top end lane of soundcards, with lynx on top (but very expensive), and sitting along with RME. But quite frank, the difference between most high end soundcards (with the expection of the lynx) is not really significant. I used to have aardvark's DP 2496 and I liked it.
Motu's quality might be a little better than my previous aardvark. The thing that sold me was the other features, like 24 tracks capability, plus the analog I/O, 3 banks of adat/tdif banks, SMPTE and Video sync right in the box. I've heard some bad stories about motu's windows drivers, but for me it was different. The 2408 works flawless with my PC.
Good luck."
The reason I went with this unit was every one that had A/B the units concluded It was at least as good or better than the aardvark, eco, or maudio units. All the other digital options tilted the scale for me, as well as the cuemix. cuemix took me a little bit to get use to (I was expecting it to work more like the mia dsp monitoring than it did), but now that I have it figured out - it rocks. Great for recording more than one person at a time, or having your own monitoring mix and then one for the one being recorded - all with no latency.
I hope this helps.
