personally speaking, i would avoid this card. even though the RME products that came after this are, in my opinion, peerless, this one came before RME really understood how to do PCI bus-mastering. as a result it is an inefficient h/w design that requires the device driver to do a bunch of work that in the digi9652 and everything that followed was done by the hardware. i am sure that the sound quality is good, probably even a little better than the m-audio but certainly comparable - its just not up the same internal design specs as RME's later products.