I just bought a pair of new mics that I'd LIKE to use simultaneously with a 'main'/center mic in perhaps a 3-mic-setup. Unfortunately, I've got only a PreSonus Audiobox, which gives me a grand total of two inputs.
I don't have a very specific budget, but let's say $200 and under- does anyone have a recommendation for a 4- or 8- input interface that plays well with Win7 and SONAR X3, and hopefully has better-sounding preamps and better 48V routing options than the Audiobox?

Update: A guy an hour from my place has a PreSonus Firepod. That IS 8 inputs on a FireWire interface - compatible with my system as far as that goes. Plus, it's only $100, that's how much I paid for this 2-input noisemaker I've got now! 
Any thoughts? How compatible will this unit be with SONAR X3 Studio on a 64-bit Windows 7 desktop?

The FP is a solid piece.  Old converters and pres, but acceptable.  I had mine a long time ago and can't remember what the latency was, but it worked fine with SONAR and Sony software.  I gave it to a cousin for his band - the singer already had one and you can run two as a 16 I/o combo.  In short, it should be fine.  I actually liked the lower fidelity on an old Jimmy Rodgers cover than my replacement TC.
 
If you were closer you could borrow the TC unit.  I talked to cousin about that one, too, but he never bothered to get it. PM me.

Good to know AT. I'll consider it mine (the FP, that is). Would've been cool to try out the TC.
I see that the Firepod gets stated a lot for that it can be daisychained. Is that the biggest/best feature of the unit? I'm not going to need any more than 6 inputs any time soon in the home studio!
 
Any other comments on this interface, guys? It looks like it'll do the trick nicely for my current situation, so if not, I'm picking it up on Saturday!

I don't know about daisy chaining - just heard it was possible.  And you lose the spdif in/out too.  There may be a firmware update, too.

I still use an old Edirol FA-101 on a Win 7 system. It is also FireWire. I had a world of problems when I first used it on my HP desktop. It was flawless on a very old Dell laptop.

Even though HP tech insisted the FireWire ports were Texas Instrument ones, they weren't. Latency and crashes insued until I bought a TI FireWire card. It was better, but still had issues until I came up with the idea of going into device manager and disable the original FireWire ports. What a world of difference.

I think FireWire is wonderful and if you go that route and have issues think about my 2 fixes.

Be aware the FW is not being supported by Win10 and future updates may break it over and over again, requiring you to fix it again and again. At some point Win7 will go away and you'll be forced to upgrade. Not sure I'd invest further in FW at this point.

fret_man
Be aware the FW is not being supported by Win10 and future updates may break it over and over again, requiring you to fix it again and again. At some point Win7 will go away and you'll be forced to upgrade. Not sure I'd invest further in FW at this point.

You're 100% certain of that? I'm still on Windows 7 - my machine has some problems with HP's Updater so I've NEVER been able to update any HP services, and sometimes the tower won't turn off until the system crashes, usually forcing a reboot later. But it works fine as long as I turn it off properly when I'm done, or leave it in sleep mode.
 
I'll do what I can to avoid 10, as I hate 10 thus far where I've seen it/used it.

Since it looks like I'll be making a purchase on a couple of new Firewire cables, I figured I might as well go ahead and get the processor upgrade I've been looking at for 7 months.
Question is what type of upgrades are going to make the biggest difference in performance?
 
- I've heard about dual-channel mode on RAM. right now my setup is using 3x 2GB ram sticks and 1x 1GB stick, but I don't know if that is hurting my computer's ability to run in Dual-channel mode since the second pair isn't matched.
 
- My current processor is a decent, stock quad-core, but I'm considering moving up to a hexacore - specifically this one. Any thoughts? Comments?
 
I figured if I wanted to do a little bit of lightweight gaming now and again, I'd also want to upgrade my video card. Would doing this have any noticeable effect on the running of the software or anything?
Here's what I was looking at.
 
So I've got a little quest ahead of me. I'm not quite sure what I'll want to upgrade to achieve better performance in general, so hopefully you guys can help point me in the right direction.

Not identical memory modules not good for stability. Now good performance for audio recording is 8gb or 16gb RAM. Processor - need more cores and MHz for realtime FX support. Video card not get much more performance for sound recording, only for software interface. General - processor.