| I own the 1212m cards and a Saffire Pro 26 I/O. Even though the Saffire Pro 26 is a quality unit and offers a lot of "bang for the buck", the 1212m has two HUGE advantages over the SFP26. First, as many of y'all already know, the Emu has the same conversion chips as a Digi 192, and sounds incredible - especially when sync'd to a w/c (you need the optional clock card). It really does sound fantastic. The other HUGE advantage has to do with latency... Since the SFP26 is a firewire I/O, there is an obvious (and unacceptable to me) latency even when set to 4ms. I simply cannot track vocals this way. Of course, the SFP26 offers a direct monitor mixer, but I track vox with compression, eq and fx to coax a better performance from the artist - which is not possible with the SFP26 using direct monitoring. This is where the Emu stuff totally destroys the competition... The mixer/monitor interface of the 1212m provides insert points for every channel, including the master L/R. That means that I can have perceived zero latency monitoring for the artist while using the dynamics and fx on the return monitor channel which feeds the cans. I don't know of any other mixer interface that has insert points like that. Even without that feature, the 1212m offers a pretty latency free experience since it's PCI based and not on firewire.
The SFP26 I/O is a good piece of gear, and if you're not spoiled from using a TDM/HD system for years like me you'll find many uses for it. The pres are very good (better than Saffire and Saffire Pro) and you get 8 of them for starters.
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Clearly def
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