[LAU] Suggestions on how to improve quality of recordings?

Each Sunday, my church's band records the service. The recording is done to an IBM Thinkpad laptop via a 16-channel USB device of some sort that takes in raw audio signals and digitizes them while they pass through to the mixer. The laptop receives the digitized audio as data over USB, where it's recorded to the hard drive. Oh, we also have an audio processor box of some sort that does a bit of compression or some other processing on just the voices. I don't know if the input that the computer is getting has gone through the audio processor before getting to the computer or not. The guy who's doing the mixing says he adds compression, typically. If you listen to a few of the recordings here: http://www.clanjones.org/stnicks/music/ You can get an idea of some of the quality we're getting now. Our former drummer and saxophonist, who has a hearing loss of some sort, mixes the raw tracks down to what you hear there. He's doing it under Windows XP, I forget what program he uses. He's offered to make the tracks available to me for mixing, but I don't have the disk space or time to do it ... I'm the only Linux user in the bunch, the rest are still enslaved in the Matrix ;-) We've been told by many people that the sound people hear from the main speakers is fine - but us in the band have no idea what it sounds like. The guy doing our mixing says he is trying to mix it to match what he hears from the mains. Anyway, suggestions? My experience with recording anything was back in the early 70's in a garage band environment! -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community