Am Freitag, 7. November 2008 schrieb Sean Darby: I don't know the quality of the 1010 preamps. I know the quality of my Presonus preamps and can compare them (from experience) to Mackie, Behringer, Yamaha, Soundcraft and Midas. And unless you have a mixer of the last two companies, you should really ditch the mixer and record directly to the Presonus... It really depends on the mixer (and the soundcard you are buying). I think the best bet would be to try soundcard-only first and if that doesn't fill your needs get a mixer. The "modern" was a bit ironic after realizing how many people in this list are older then me (thanks to dave for this thread!), in practice even the simple and cheap hda has at least 6 output channels. Though you can't always use them because of missing hardware and strange mixer-settings. And you shouldn't really use the hda for quality reasons. The 3+4 is not the number of outputs but the channels to use for headphones: 1+2 main-mix to the studio-speakers, 3+4 first musicians headphone, 5+6 second headphone,... You can also go via line-connections from the mixer to the soundcard. Some soundcards do have symmetric line-inputs which is generally better than the normal asymmetric line input. Have fun, Arnold -- visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/ --- Hi, I am a .signature virus. Please copy me into your ~/.signature and send me to all your contacts. After a month or so log in as root and do a "rm -rf /". Or ask your administrator to do so...