The 1820M box is a standard half rack, and E-mu does sell a rack mount kit for it.
Can't convert 44 above 48? That's...a very weird thing to point out. I don't get what you're trying to say. What hardware out there does do onboard hardware resampling as an explicit feature? And it actually does do this in one particular way (as do most interfaces...like the Aardvark you mention) if you consider driver compatibility with Windows realtime sample rate conversion to be that.
And there's no supposedly about it. it records at 96 and 192...it just takes away some of your inputs when you do it. At 96, the 1820M has 12 input recording simultaneous, while at 192, it can do 4.
My take is this:
The 1820M is a fine hardware piece which sounds excellent and offers many routing options. The Patchmix software used to control it isn't perfect, and many people find themselves stumped by it. If you work with it, it's not hard at all, but it is somewhat clunky for doing the simple stuff that people will use it for 98% of the time. The mic preamps are quite fine sounding...though possibly too hot, and it doesn't offer a pad for the hottest condensers.
The biggest issue is with drivers. If you're using something like Cool Edit or Adobe Audition which uses the WDM driver model for accessing sound cards... don't get it. E-mu hasn't made good WDM drivers for this sound card. Actually, they're downright bad. You don't get multi-channel in and out with WDM. It also doesn't support GSIF (Gigasampler) or stacking multiple E-mu cards in a system...nope, no 36 inputs in a computer for 1000 bucks. It doesn't support bit-accurate passing of streams on the SPDIF connections, if you want to use the soundcard to pass digital surround streams to a decoder. There is no 88.2 kHz recording feature. You can't use both a coax and optical SPDIF device simultaneously.
These are features the vast majority of sound cards out there support. OTOH, if you're absolutely sure you don't need this capability, the E-mu cards are fantastic offerings to consider...possibly the best under 1000. Above that, offerings from MOTU and RME trump the E-mu in terms of options and expansion possibilities, but not necessarily in pure sound quality.
