Hi Chad, welcome to RO.

I think you have too many things going here and should slim it down to Mac or PC and not mix a laptop with desktop or, are you meaning a PC laptop too? If you are upgrading I wouldn't be thinking PCI, I would be thinking PCIe as it has a better spec. But you won't be doing PCI or PCIe with a laptop either. You are FW, USB or MADI.

I was going to suggest RME but since you have Pro Tools, forget RME and go with a company that supports Avid. RME from my understanding does not support the upper level digi IO so you should take that into consideration.
I'm sure others will make more sense with what you are doing than I. Hope that helps some.

Thanks for writing back audiokid. I agree, the set up is very confusing, let me try and clear it up a bit. The studio already has a Delta 1010 in it and I am going to get rid of that AI because it is only PCI. Therefore, I'm looking for a new AI that supports Pro Tools 9, Sony Vegas 10, and Adobe Audition.

I think MOTU will handle all of your platforms. The problem will be interfacing between the two different computer systems.

You don't give a budget for this re-working of the interface. You presumably have pre-amps that you used with the Delta 1010.

I would certainly consider the RME FireFace UFX, as this would give you choice of USB or FireWire operation. The UFX has 4 built-in pre-amps and a further 8 line inputs to take the output of exisiting pre-amps. It will run with the software that you mention. [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.youtube…"]Here's[/]="http://www.youtube…"]Here's[/] a YouTube video of one running with PT9 Native. I'm not a PT user, but I would warn that there have been rumblings in the audio community about problems with turning off PT monitoring in favour of monitoring via TotalMix.

I agree with Boswell and was going to suggest the UFX or a FF800 as well but be sure you aren't going to want to upgrade your ProTools 9 to Native or do extensive MIDI. I have just done substantial research on upgrading my studio and chose RME over the majority of AI for various reasons. I just bought 2 ADI-8 QS and the HDSPe interface but cannot use it to IO into ProTools Native. Not that I want to, ProTools 9 is all I'm interested in but if you expand your studio and need the higher end ProTools (Native), you better look beyond RME.

Maybe I'm wrong here Bos, I'll have to look at the video to see if the UFX works with PT Native?

The claim on the video is that it "works with" Native. Whether there is a distinction between that and being "fully integrated" or even "is usable with", I don't know.

Thank you all for your feedback. My budget is about 1500. I'm going to push studio owner to up that to 2000 so I can get the UFX. Yes, I am running a Focusrite Pre Amp and compression before sending to the AI. The studio will be used 95% of the time for audio book recording, lectures, radio programs, and narration overdub for video.