i have an older 896, and i can say that the mic pre's are junk. a friend has digi002, and we a/b'd the two interfaces and the digi002's standard mic pres blew the 896's away. me personally, i'm getting rid of my 896, and looking at the firepod.
as far as the monitoring, it is wierd. i never bothered to figure it out, because i can hear myself sing, and i can hear my guitar/bass/drums while i'm playing it over the rest of the mix in my headphones. i just adjust the level of the phones mix and let the natural sound bleed past the headphones and into my ears. in other words, i can't do "direct monitoring". actually, come to think of it, i did set it up one time to be able to do that, but the latency was really messing with me, so that was that. but that was a long time ago, and i don't remember exactly what i did to enable the monitoring, but that, and the terrible mic pre's are my only complaints with that unit.
