Need advice on A/D please

[chipwits]

I want so much to get Lynx Aurora 8, but by time I get everything to get it going with my PC (cables, card, etc), it will cost around $3000. That is a quite an investment in one piece of gear for me. (At least with microphones and SCA preamp modules, I can buy one high end piece at a time, from month to month.)

Can anyone recommend a $1500 or less solution that has much better D/A than a Delta 1010? Or should I just buy the Delta 1010 for $350 and be done with it?

This is for home recording; not too many tracks, but I want something that at least sounds professional and presentable. Will the Delta do it for me? Btw, I only need a 44.1khz/24 bit converter if anyone can recommend a used one that sounds better than Delta 1010; doubt I'll use any higher sample rate since I want to use so many PC tools, plugins. I can get by with 2 channels, but 8 would be nice to have if I wanted to do more with it later.

I need some educated recommendations please.

Thanks so much,
James

 

[Massive Master]

MOTU's 24-I/O - cheap for a 24/24 unit. I know a few who use it on almost everything with excellent results.

 

[Superhuman]

You can get an Apogee AD8000 for about $1200 on E-Bay - there was just a thread on the difference between the quality from the Apogee and the 1010. I recently used the exact same rig on DI through a Delta then on an Apogee AD8000, when the two wavs were played back on the same studio gear and monitors there was a noticable difference in quality between the two. You can get better more epensive units but the AD8000 is still in a lot of pro-studios today.