I have both a DAW (Cubase/pIII-800MHz/5126Mb) and a standalone HDR (Fostex D1624 16-track). I find that I do most of my tracking on the standalone. I can then fly the recorded tracks to the DAW and play around with them, or (more often) sync the HDR to the DAW with timecode and use the DAW primarily as a MIDI engine while the real audio work happens on the HDR.
I'm glad that I have the DAW, because there are some editing and production chores that it is *much* better able to handle than the (minimal) built-in editing capabilities of the HDR. There are definite exposures when doing computer recording, though: foremost among them is the fact that it takes a great deal of time, and more patience than I can spare at the moment, to get the recording hardware and software to actually work reliably.
After 6 months and many hours of research into optimal DAW setup, upgrading drivers, and general screwing around with the box, I still experience occasional dropouts when recording to Cubase. The software will abruptly stop recording in mid-take. Happens about 10-15% of the time, always at a different, random point in the track. It's a right pisser when it happens, too. My solution is simple: if I'm trying to track to the computer I'll also have the HDR printing the same material as a failsafe backup (since I'm using its converters, anyway). But if I didn't have that backup plan in hand, I'd be a *very* frustrated camper, and I'd have missed some important stuff.
Lots of people here do very well with computer-based recording. Others, like me, prefer the standalone approach for whatever reasons, and are willing to accept the cost. I work with computers all day, every day... When I want to do music, I want to *do music*, not screw around with the computer some more! Your mileage will certainly vary, because there is no right answer. Your music, your style, your pocketbook, and your personality will dictate what hardware you should use. The most important thing is to _try several examples_, if possible, so that you can see where the warts are. Don't buy blind.
On the Audiophile 24/96: I have one for my DAW monitoring setup, and I'm getting ready to replace it with an external converter box. The card does work very well, and the converters are pretty good. But I find that I'm easily annoyed by certain things, and one of them is noise that has a pitched character. In my system, the Audiophile's noise floor consists of various pitched whines and wheezes that vary with the SCSI bus activity, the video image on the monitor, and so on. This is way down there, but I highly doubt that it is -103dBFS as spec'd. -80, *maybe*, but certainly not -100! They must have spec'd that card with the host computer halted.
Anyway, after 6 months or so I find the EMI-driven noise floor to be increasingly annoying, so I'm upgrading to some converters that don't live inside the computer's box. If you do dense mixes, you'd probably never notice this. But I work with a lot of sparse mixes of acoustic music, trying to get the reverb tails and the decays right, and the digital wheezes in the whitespace are starting to drive me _nuts_: it sounds like someone is standing behind me with an electric toothbrush while I'm trying to work. Probably nobody else would notice, but it has started to irritate me.
Once again, that's just me. Don't let that scare you off from the card. It offers great bang for the buck, and a lot of people love it, and rightly so. It undoubtedly works fine for them. The bottom line just has to be: *whatever* you're thinking about laying out cash for, find a way to lay hands on and give it a critical listen first, if you can. One thing is certainly true- this stuff ain't cheap!
