On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 22:54 +0100, Florian Blaser wrote: So, you need 16 inputs out of which 2 are mic preamps needing phantom power? Get an M-Audio Delta 1010 first, it does not have phantom power but it provides half of the number of channels you need. Later on you can buy another one and wordsync them together. http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta1010-main.html It's about $450 in most places, but you can dive below that with a bit of research. If the full 1010 is too expensive, get a 1010LT: http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta1010LT-main.html Neither this one has phantom power, nor does it have the nifty rackmountable box, nor has it balanced ins/outs, but it's $230 online or less. For a couple mic inputs with phantom power, well, get a DMP3 or something like that: http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/DMP3-main.html I'm not sure what do you mean by control surface, it depends on what do you want to control. The channels on the Delta 1010 cards can be controlled in software, there's a pretty good GUI that gives you full control. If you're talking about the output to the monitors and things like that, Mackie Big Knob is pretty promising: http://www.mackie.com/products/bigknob/index.html Samson C-Control does almost the same things at half the price, but i've been told that the sound quality is much lower (and i'm not surprised). I always wondered if there are any dumb devices that can generate simple MIDI events when pressing a button or something like that. That would be cool. -- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org/