Novation X-Station...

I just bought one of these guys yesterday and got up and running with it pretty fast.

I love it. It's what I've wanted for a while--I can record two channels (vocals & guitar) with effects or monitor with effects and record dry; I have a small midi controller for soft synths, I have a hardware synthesizer I can record midi and audio to Sonar with simultaneously. I have a control surface for transport (play, record, etc.), mixing levels, pan, solos, mutes, record enable, etc. Sorry if I sound like an ad, but this thing is just plain cool.

I don't know what to say about sound quality yet, the sounds in the thing are pretty nice, but may be a little thin. The effects are crap, but work well for giving me verb/chorus/delay on my vocals while i record them dry. The only real issue I have so far is that the CPU usage in Sonar seems to jump quite a bit more than it did with my old Echo Indigo I/O. However, I haven't tweaked the audio settings yet. Even so, it plays my old songs ok.

All and all I'm pretty happy with it. I bought it at Chuck Levin's Washington Music Center for $405. The cheapest I saw online was $495, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

I'll keep you posted as I inevitably run into some major issue with this thing in the future...
-Mike

PS I'll post the Control Surface file for it somewhere online if anyone is interested, but it was pretty easy to create manually.