Anyone familiar with the Focusrite Scarlett 8i6?

Hello again guys. I have another question(s) for you all.

First off here is a link to the Scarlett 8i6 page at Focusrite...

http://www.focusrite.com/...terfaces/scarlett_8i6/

So the past couple of days you guys may have seen me moaning about engine stops and dropouts but here are the details again. I just installed Sonar X1 Production Suite and have been working through the tutorials. When I got to the "Mixing" section of the tuts Sonar would stop working and give me a "Engine Has Stopped" message. Not a full crash but it just stops playback and gives me the message. It also doesn't seem to like playing drum loops in SD3. A few helpful people here suggested adjusting the buffer rate and I called Cake support about some other stuff but mentioned this problem as well. He said to try the buffer increase as well but said due to my system (which is MORE than powerful enough to run X1) and the actions that were causing the dropouts that there could be a hardware conflict (which I'm assuming means the Layla is causing the issue). So I tried the buffer increase and I was getting approx 25ms latency total (in + out) which apparently isn't that great and I STILL got a dropout last night (mind you I was doing something pretty dumb but still).

So now I'm thinking I should just replace the damned thing outright to something more modern. I was going to wait a while and get a MOTU eventually but I think I may need to do this NOW so I need a more inexpensive solution.

So the questions are a) do you guys think the Layla could be the source of these dropouts? b) Is the Scarlett 8i6 an improvement over the Layala? c) What are some of your opinions on the Scarlett and are there any other products in the $300 price range I should be looking at instead?

As far as I can tell the only thing I'd be losing out on really are the extra 6 line outs the Layla has and I won't really need those anyway because I'll just be outputting straight to my monitors. I also like the mixer software and the fact it comes with Ableton Live Lite (I've been wanting to check out Ableton as a secondary DAW as I've heard X1 and Ableton live make a good team as far as creating music). So yeah... that's it for now.

Thanks in advance.

@OlSkoolGuy... Hello there. That is very helpful. Thank you. I also really like the idea of virtual ins or whatever they are called. I can see being able to record directly from other applications without physical connections extremely useful. I was originally looking at some of the M-Audio Fastrack stuff but it seems Focusrite gives more bang for the buck. I also like that it's made of steel as opposed to plastic. Definitely leaning towards this box at the moment. Gonna have to sacrifice a couple of other purchases though to make it happen but they were more window dressing for my set up anyway. Obviously a good i/o is more important than extra VSTs. Cheers!

AAAND that Octo8 dealymabob that can be hooked up to it VIA optical would let me get the full i/o connectivity I was looking at the MOTU for anyway as well as having pres on every channel. For both it would end up costing about the same as a MOTU. Yeah... I think I'm just selling myself on this thing now.