Until now, I have been tracking to a Mackie hard disk recorder (SDR) and then dumping all the tracks onto my computer for editing/mixing, but I have decided that this process is too inefficient and am going to sell the recorder and record straight to the computer. So now i need an audio interface, but I'm having problems finding any that will suit my needs and price range.

My preferred computer connection is firewire, because I am using a laptop now, but sometime in the future i plan to get a dedicated-to-audio desktop. The problem seems that all firewire interfaces are all in one boxes with a mix of a few preamps, line ins and outs, a few digital i/o choices, maybe a midi or two, and a perhaps a control surface. I would like to have most of these as separate pieces so they can be upgraded in the future. Here are the features I need:

1. laptop digital sound card (preferably firewire, pcmcia if its the only option)
2. around 16 analog inputs with decent converters (no preamps)
3. around 16 analog outputs with cheap as cheap as possible converters to mix headphone signals from
4. 2 channel high quality analog output for monitoring

Is there any product (or combination of products) that can accomplish this that I don't know about? I know the price range makes a huge difference in this. I cannot afford two the Apogeerosetta with firewire cards, which would be a good solution.

One option I considered was a RME Digiface which has 3 ADAT optical inputs/outputs to pcmcia (or pci card which i could get when i get a desktop), but I read in other posts about this same topic that ADAT is starting to be phased out. My hope was that I could get a good sound card now that would last for a long time and cheaper AD/DA converters now that I could upgrade later. (ie get two Alesis AI3's now and later on get a better 16 channel AD only converter). But If the ADAT in the Digiface won't be the preferred way of transfering from the better converters to the computer, I will be stuck having to buy a new card in the near future.

So what is the newer/best digital I/O option and are there any laptop cards which would accomodate it?

I'm really stuck on what to do here so I would be very grateful for any help.

p.s. Im using a mac powerbook g4, and still deciding between getting Cubase or logic.

Charlie