If your looking for a new interface

If your looking for a new interface, you might want to look at the Antelope Orion, sounds quite amazing!
 

If you're looking at one I can tell you that they sound great and play well with Sonar. A few things to know about the unit:
1. It works great via USB, but only if you keep the cable pretty short, so if you have a machine room or closet where you computer is you'll want to keep the unit in there. 
2. There aren't any pre-amps included, so if that's what you're looking for it's probably the wrong unit. Also the analog I/O is all D-sub so you'll likely want a patchbay.
3. the routing is a bit limited. I run mine alongside an Aurora 16 via MADI from an RME HDSPe MADI fx so it's not a problem for me, but if you use the onboard mixer for cue mixes or whatever your options will be limited.
 
Beyond that, it's a great unit and does work well...been pretty happy with mine.
 
Good luck
Dean

Hi Dan,
I use my Orion via MADI, so I can't easily test USB latency. I did do some playing with it via USB when I first got it a while back and my recollection is that it worked fine and my softsynths were perfectly usable. IIRC the latency with it via USB seemed to match up pretty well with what Antelope shows here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztptdcqXjr4&feature=share&list=UUlO-J9ik6SdPP-stEaRkNuw
 
Dean
 
EDIT - Also the Antelope folks say on the site "The latency performance varies between only 1 and 6.5 ms for different hardware and software configurations." There used to be a section where they gave the following numbers:
 
Latency performance*
Cubase 6.5: 2.5 ms – 3.5 ms
Samplitude 12: 1 ms – 3 ms
Logic 9: 2.5 ms – 6.5 ms
Ableton 8: 2.2 ms – 4 ms
Nuendo 5.5: 2.5 ms – 3.5 ms
* All Latency times were tested between sample rates of 44.1 and 192 khz with lowest buffer setting, actual results may vary.
 
IIRC that seems to match up fairly well with my experience under Sonar.

Hi WDI,
Yep, I had a Q10 back in the day as well and was not terribly pleased when they disappeared. That said, Antelope has been a good stable company for quite some time now, but it was certainly a consideration.
 
Dean

Hi:
Was Igor the owner of Aardvark then though?  I don't think so.  I think that he only works for Aardvark or a partner at best. So when the company folded, he went on on his own. I don't think we can blame him to be fair.
dan
 

Well I really didn't want to dog on Igor. The Q10 was cool and who knows what really happened to Aardvark.

Anyways the Orion looks pretty sweet. Perfect for 24 analog I/O to a mixer. Currently I have to use the AD converters on an Alesis HD24 when needing more than 10 analog I/O with the RME FireFace. I connect the two via Adat giving me 26 analog I/O. It works good but is kind of a convoluted process.

Hi Tony,
Yeah, MADI + Orion is really nice. Only downside is if you have multiple different brand converters the conversion latency can cause some phase problems. Honestly, if you don't need the additional routing options and the minor latency hit from USB isn't a problem it's probably just as well to stay with the Orion running over USB. Also, MADI out of the Orion does limit you to 96khz (unless you reduce your channel count), but that's not really a problem for most folks.
 
OTOH, seeing 194 ins and 196 outs from my RME HDSPe MADI FX in Sonar (before you pare down the exposed I/O's) is kinda awesome :) And TotalMix really is ridiculously cool.
 
If you have questions about MADI with the Orion let me know and I can try to help out. There are some potential speed bumps with PT10 and some MADI cards as well.
 
Dean

Seems rather short sighted to make this thing USB...that many inputs and you pick the slowest possible bus architecture available...