FocusRite Scarlett 6i6
So, today, while my partner happily shopped in Guildford, I dropped into Andertons (excellent store btw with great knowledgeable staff) and picked up the 6i6 to replace my aging Roland UA25.
So far I am extremely impressed. It's not bus powered so the ground loops that plagued the UA25 have finally gone away. It's absolutely silent, as you would expect. Very solid construction, similar to the UA25, aluminium case and all the knobs and sockets look like they can take it.
Since my main usage is to play softsynths, I was very pleased to see that running on my Acer laptop (core i7/8G RAM) it will run three instances of Kontakt playing two pianos and RealGuitar at a reported latency of 3.3ms in Reaper. Probably can load up a few more instances, CPU is ticking away around 10% with that load. This is also plugging it in via a hub (but it is a very very good hub - Pluggable 10 port - it's absolutely excellent. I can run everything off it without any glitches and just connect to one USB port on the laptop).
Also currently there is a promotion so that you get a free download of Focusrite's Midnight suite which comprises a compressor and EQ. Not something that matters a lot but nice to have, I guess...