Welcome to the BBS Guthrie. I'm working in bristol at the moment (filton), I live up the road in Bath.
If you have a PC then a PCI card would be the better option in my opinion, I'd use firewire if I had to go mobile with a laptop or whatever. USB is the least stable of the bunch. A lot of people do seem to use firewire interfaces with their PCs though and they seem quite happy with it.
A big consideration is how many sources you'd want to record simultaneously?
The M Audio Delta 44 has 4 balanced analog ins and outs in a breakout box and will cost you around £90 from somewhere like digital village:
http://www.dv247.com/invt/4604
You'd only generally get xlr ins on an interface that has mic preamps built in to it. Otherwise they'd be on 1/4" jacks or RCA's. I personally steer clear of cards with built in mic pres because the quality isn't usually great.
Of course if the preamps are part of your £150 budget then that changes things. In this instance my recommendation would be the M Audio Audiophile 2496.
http://www.dv247.com/invt/2062
This would give you 2 inputs and 2 outputs plus MIDI in/out, there's no breakout box but bear with me.
The Audiophile card is only about £55 so the remainder you could spend on an M Audio DMP-3 two channel mic preamp. The outputs of this would go to the ins on the card and the DMP-3 could sit on your desktop so once it's hooked up there'd be no faffing about behind the comp, you'd just be hooking up cables to the preamp. The cheapest I've seen the DMP-3 is about £104 from a german site called thommann:
http://www.thomann.de/index.html?pa...info.html?sn=564a09a1e8f7d2dbd91cd8e0cd74dac3
I've bought a lot of stuff from them and they're very reliable.
So this would mean upping your budget by about £10 but you would have 2 very nice, clean recording channels which you could use with microphones or instruments (the DMP-3 has DI inputs on each channel) and you'd have MIDI in/out for your controller keyboard.
If you need more simultaneous inputs
and mic preamps then realistically you need to up your budget a bit if you want reasonable quality.
Hope this helps.
