I have a very simliar setup as cryophonik described. I started with a M Audio 2496 PCI card in my first PC. I used a Behringer 1604A for Inputs and routing. After a few years I built up a laptop system with a Emagic EMI and later with my MOTU 828 MKII. Now the MOTU is the center of my recording setup. It´s a nice tool and I love the direct mixing functunality because I do not need a mixer for just playing around with my digital piano without th computer turned on. For "physical mixing-feel" I use a Peavey Studio Mix Controler that works very well for me. That is a great and "small" setup!
You can see the setup on my homepage: http://www.maiseintopf.de.vu
Best regards from Germany
Andi

sup lain

yeah man, i went from redrum to battery because of the samples and features. the battery samples sounded better to me and your able to get a chance to try and use the multi sample trigger feature. this allows you to link samples to other samples, so say you want to have a snare top and bottom hit at the same time. link the 2 together in the battery sampler and then you'll only have to draw 1 hit in sonars piano roll. Another reason i switched from the reason redrum rewire to battery was to save on resources...although with my current setup, its not a problem. but basicly, instead of having reason opened with all the samples loaded and rewire, and sonar...i would just open sonar and have battery 2 loaded as a softsynth.

The same goes for why i switched from Battery 2 to DFH 2. The samples blew them away, sounded way more realistic for my style of drumming and are true multi velocity, sampled samples. DFH2 is pretty much a few rock/metal complet drumsets where battery 2 was a complete library of samples. 99% of my projects are "metal" based so i didnt really need all the other music style samples for the 1% id try and do some kinda "metal-drum'n bass" hybrid. and DFH2 handles as a softsynth as well so the programming is the same. Not mention the sampler for battery2 and dfh2 are able to manipulate the samples ie...multiband eq's, reverb, comp on each individual sample. this way i dont have to have so many fx running in sonar as well.