Focusrite Saffire Pro 10

This is an 8 preamp firewire recording interface. It has xlr and 1/4" inputs as well as eight analogue outs. The units allows direct monitoring from the box, mised with playback from the computer's hard drive, mixed through a software mixing surface.

The case is rugged and well-made, and can be rack-mounted if you want to take it on the road.

I am not a big fan of small rotary trim controls, but these are no wrse than mose channel strips.

The unit allows for spdif in and out as well as daisy chaining of upt to three units through a second firewire port on the unit. This means up to 24 channels of preamps as well as digital input.

I have used Pci cards for recording and other breakout boxes, but none of those compare to the quality of this unit. The preamps are extremely clean and bring out subtle qualities in microphones that were hard to get without eqing. The extra headroom you get, especially with the external psu, is great for handling very hot mics. Describing sound is always a very subjective thing, but I look for a clean, uncoloured signal that I can play with later, if I want. This unit delivers exactly that. The difference I noticed is probably in part because of a shorter, high quality signal chain (rather than going through a mixing board into a breakout box), but I am very impressed with the sound.

The outputs can be routed in a variety of ways to get you surround sound, multiple monitor mixes or and 8-in-8-out configuration. This can be really useful, depending on the project.

The unit can be powered by an external PSU or the firewire (although you lose the extra headroom if you power it with your computer alone. If you want, you can use the unit as a live standalone mixer, with the software included. The phantom power is split on/off for four channels at a time, if you want to run a condenser and a ribbon mic during the same session, or for some other reason.

This is a 24 bit unit. Some people might balk at the fact that it only goes up to a 96 kHz sampling rate (there is a more expensive cousin that goes higher) for most people working on audio production, where the final detination is a 44.1-16 bit CD quality audio, this is not a real-world issue. If you can't get what hou need at 44.1 or 88.2, the problem is probably not with the interface, but somewhere else in your equipment.

The unit includes bundled software (reverb, amp modeling, eq). The reverb isn't bad. I can take or leave the eq, and I don't like the amp modeling software at all. I didn't buy the unit for the software, so I wasn't too worried about this category.

Overall, I would say this is an excellent unit for anyone looking to upgrade from pci cards, or where you are looking for a number of very good quality preamps to reacord your tracks.