if its for a desktop pc, get an m-audio card.
a
delta 44.
4 in/4 out 1/4 TRS
(any of the delta series are solid in my opinoon)
plus m-audio has great support for drivers.
the good thing about this interface is that its a pci card, so it connects directly to your motherboard. no latency worries, or any of that jazz. If you have to get a mixer to satisies XLR ins, do so..
I disagree. I'm not impressed with the sound quality of the Delta hardware. I remember when I switched from a 1010LT to an M-Audio FW1814 and I remember how much clearer everything sounded. It was like a veil was lifted and suddenly everything was crisp. YMMV, of course. This sound quality difference shouldn't surprise anyone who has seen how many electrolytic caps are present on the Delta boards. There are so many cans that it looks like the storage area outside an oil refinery.
IMHO, if you're going to spend $150 on a Delta card, you're awfully close to the cost of a much more modern interface that sounds better, is likely to be just as reliable (and possibly more reliable), and will still be working long after the PCI standard is dead and buried (PCI is on its way out in favor of PCIe, which isn't compatible with legacy parallel PCI cards).
Also, my experience with M-Audio Delta drivers, at least on the Mac, was that they've been utter crap ever since they were bought by Digi (buy your competition and drive their products into the ground, perhaps?) and started incorporating support for Pro Tools M-Powered. Every driver after that caused problems for me up until I bought a machine that no longer had any legacy PCI slots and I sold the thing.
Their PC drivers have also lagged way behind the rest of the industry, dribbling out Vista drivers all the way up until something like a year and a half after MOTU had all their hardware working in Vista, if memory serves.... I'm not too impressed by that. And M-Audio is still working on 64-bit Vista (in Beta) while MOTU shipped theirs in non-Beta state in January... of 2007.... And people complain that MOTU's Windows support is bad?
I could probably rant for a week about my M-Audio experiences, but I'll save a few bits and suggest that you search for some of my rants on the subject before considering their hardware.
Besides, if you ever decide to mix or edit at a pro studio, you can always use OMF to move your project between whatever app you use and whatever they have (or just freeze all the tracks to disk and skip the project file entirely).
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