M-Audio makes one called the Octane, but I have idea how good it is. I expect it has a no frills sterile sound.

i use the delta 1010 by m audio and am impressed with the a/d conveters in it all in all they make some prity good stuff.

The Presonus Digimaz is really nice, and behringer makes on thats decent- but you pay for what you get....
digimax- 700 bucks
behringer- 200 bucks

Well, What I think is just good is likely to be very much different than what others think is good and that would be units that are well over the $1000 mark.

A friend actually brought over the B... unit and it was ok for what it was- 8 ch pres like the bottom of the line art and AD like the old motu 2408 (not the new one!) the light pipe was the saving grace, though. If you don't have anything else $200 does the job in a pinch especially with the light pipe option- but I am not planning on buying one anytime soon.... if it was a choice between a 2ch art and a 8 ch b for the same money, though, I go for the B-

Take a look at the new M-Audio Octane which has 8-mic pres with ADAT out. The best part about it that caught my eye was that there is also 8-line level inputs that bypass the mic pre's and go straight to the converters.

I have a Focusrite Octopre, and though it obviously isn't in the league of its bigger brothers (or other high end pres) it's doing it's job in a really good way; I'd say it's a great workhorse for my basic tracking needs.

It's quite neutral and clean with an open top end, not much color though.

The AD lightpipe card is in the same league, but I would say it's better than some soundcard of higher price ( I tested it against a 001's converters and the Octopre's sounded much nicer and smoother). Plus it's got line ins too so you can bypass the pres and go sraight to the AD converter. I also use the analog line outs when I'm tracking live gigs feeding the digital part to my HD recorder and the analog lines to the FOH, kind of like an active splitter.
The added compression on each channel is handy to get some dynamic sources under control when tracking live sessions, though don't expect it to work as a full featured compressor.
One thing to be careful about: being a class A device it really gets hot during the use: this isn't much of a trouble for the unit itself, but if you don't provide proper ventilation above and below it, the AD card can go bananas due to overheating (it actually happened to me once last summer on a 40°C tracking date), so some space (not necessarily 1RU) around it is needed.

In the end though I'm adding some higher end pres to my rig I think it's a good value for the money: to me this is the key factor, I mean, you can obviously get way better pres and converters but you have to spend several K more and it won't fit in a 1RU, for my needs that feature list and portability were necessary.

Hope this helps

L.G.

Looked at the Octopre and wasn't impressed. Looked at the B'inger for a second and totally wrote it off. Looked at the ATI 8MX2 and was impressed, but it's got a TON of features that I didn't really need. The 8MX2 has 8 mic pres, built in limiters, line ins, comprehensive routing, etc. It looks like it's a great tool, and I was very impressed with the one that I recently played with.

I ended up with the Audient ASP008 w/ADAT output. Very pleased. They're clean and sound good. The Octopre, Octane, DigiMax, etc are all mid-level, I'd say.

Going for upper range you're looking at the Presonus M80, ATI, API (200 series is compact!), etc, with an external 8CH A/D. More flexible in the end, but takes up more space and consumes more power.