well, i have a firewire-24 mkII and you know, its good for the price. I got it for $450 off of ebay, and it's done great. I have a alesis multimix-8 usb, and alesis has much better preamps. But heres the thing, I needed 16 tracks to go sepparately into the DAW, how much cheaper can you go? and this was when the multimix firewire costed $800, and it only had 8 mic pres on it. Now, I learned how good of a buy it was because of other reasons. One: its big. I'm young, and I needed to establish legitamacy to get customers, and this is a hella ez way. It worked. It looks professional and it doesn't say Behringer. what else... O ya, did you mention, you can record live? I mean, that hooked me up with ppl paying for me to go see them live, n just have me put my mixer infront of the house mixer. EZ cash. The DA is not perfect, I mean, if you have good headphones or its high on the main you will hear some fuzz, but hell, it's good enough for you to monitor for a cheap price. With this, I was able to DA good enough to sell some beats for about $400. It's totally paid for it's self. I don't know if I love it, but everyone that is not an audiophile thinks it's the greatest thing ever. Put some good loud monitors next to it and no one but you can realize the crappy preamps.
And that leads me to my last point. It has direct outs. When you have better outboard pre's, you can bypass them unlike other mixers in this range. So you can actually get your Avalon (or w/e) to go through this to get a hella spectacular channel.
I think it's great for the application of looking big, recording live, and getting good loud DA for playing VST's. For actual audio recording, you will need some preamps, but don't worry, it has direct in's
