Quote: See, I am a bit curious on immediately discounting the USB 2.0 because of bandwidth issues?
You don't start seeing bandwidth issues until you have LOTS of usb stuff hooked up. AND it's always best to have the devices that send OUT via usb on one path and those that send IN on another. USB supports up to 127 devices (which is extreme... I can't for the life of me determine what you would need that way, especially in a stand-alone entertainment media pc that's hooked up to a usb mixer. [/quote]
Normally it doesnt Mat
I have done many shows with up to 15k karaoke and 10 k mp3 on an external hard drive usb to ide converter... Years ago I was doing tech support when windows me had usb... With anything hooked up to the usb and add a usb scanner at high res meant a complete system crash... 2.0 and xp is a vast improvement over those days and you are right a normal karaoke seup should not have any problems...
Presently I am using a delta44 with 4 channels record capabilities. i use 1/2 for music and 3/4 for mic1 mic2 res. Once in a while I record with sonar3 which has mult-track capabilties..Sometimes I would like to have more channels in I could add another delta 44 for about $150 but with the unit above its up to something 16 which I would never use... But it is expensive Since I dont charge for trackin mixing or mastering it is hard to justify the cost... So the interest is there like I said above but the money isnt 
One thing I did find out today the onyx models have a rec plug out with all the channels That would work with another delta44...or 1010 Just window shoppin Matt....
With permission I copied and pasted a response from another forum and knows alot more than me but it is a good answer
Dgatwood "1. USB causes heavy CPU load when doing high speed transfers. This means that USB audio is more likely to glitch when something takes a little longer than expected in software.
2. FireWire at its current maximum spec (800 Mbps) is almost twice as fast as USB 2.0. The protocol has more room for future expansion.
3. There -is- no USB 2.0 audio spec yet. "USB 2.0" audio devices are just USB 1.1 devices running at a higher data rate. Thus, the protocol is not optimized for the USB 2.0 bus, leading to further performance issues.
4. The large number of players in the USB 2.0 space, coupled with relatively lax spec compliance enforcement, has led to an awful lot of devices that just don't work very well.
5. FireWire's isoch support is more reliable than USB. Your device is pretty much guaranteed to retain an isoch reservation (joining two heavily laden FireWire busses together or introduction of buggy hardware notwithstanding), which generally means that bus contention isn't a significant issue with FireWire no matter what else is on the bus. I don't believe the same can be said of USB, or at least not to the same degree."
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