Sure, anything that takes analog signals and sends them to the computer converts them to digital along the way. The converters in your interface are "meant to be good," and they are better than the converters in a cheap sound card. As you might guess, specialized converters that cost a lot more than your interface are better (same thing with preamps).

How big are the differences? Let me start with this: I have never seen any piece of equipment of any kind that made as much difference as the differences between good program material and bad, good mic placement and bad, good room acoustics and bad. But people put a lot of time and effort and expense into the last few percentage points improvement in quality, so you shouldn't be surprised if they describe those differences as "huge" even if they are tiny compared with moving a mic a few inches. Sure the improvements are there, but until you have trained your ears to hear the differences, you are going to be in the position of spending money based on something you read on the internet. Until you can hear huge differences between converters, it's not worth spending the money on better ones.

Amen.

Mark of the Unicorn makes some nice stuff. And with the manufacturers that make nice stuff conversion is always better than run of the mill consumer sound cards. If you're not careful, better converters can cost you your masculinity. Obviously I'm not worried about masculinity. I'm utilizing a cheap Alesis HD 24XR and I'm quite happy with their internal AKM converters. It's all on how esoteric you want to go. Money can buy anything including plenty of suckers.

Tootsie Pop
Ms. Remy Ann David

well well... i have to agree with tootsie again... there really are only 5-6 companies that make the actuall converter chips... my tascam uses AKM codecs as well... the biggest difference then is how that particular manufacrurer impemented that chip and what the did on the analog level feeding that converter...