I've used a DirectPro24/96 for a couple of years now. The hardware is great for the price (the mic pre's are usable the A/D converters above average). The drivers have been stable and great for a while (on PC). If it does what you want, it's hard to find a better deal.

You need to know that only four of the 8 mic pre's have phantom power on the Q10. That may or may not matter to you.

Greetings!

My first foray into recording was picking up the Aark24. It needed outboard preamps (I ended up getting an Allen&Heath 16ch mixer for this) but once sound got to the card, it was exceptional.

About 6 months ago I picked up a Q10 to go alongside it. The performance of the Q10 has been great, but I'm still working the bugs out of the system when using it alongside the Aark24. It forced me out of the stone age of Win98, for example- the drivers wouldn't run the Aark24 until I put in Win2k.

Unless I'm recording drums, I rarely need more than 8 channels, but my drummer's setup requires 10 channels, and I'm thinking of adding a couple for spotlighting the hi-hat and ride cymbals. I can also record the whole band while tracking the drums now, and get scratch tracks of everyone else.

BTW Aardvark's support is pretty good. It's small; its just 2 guys, so it may take a returned call or 2, but they know their machines.

Maybe I just got lucky, but I've been pretty pleased. *shrug*

Good luck!

Kase

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Edited 18Jul03

Forgot to answer your original question...

If Aardvark doesn't have a press-release out for it, it's probably a long ways off. Most companies out there like to let people know what they've got coming up. Check out and see what they have cooking. I know they're trying to come up with more efficient ways of making laptop-cards with the same capacity as the systems they have, but that was from talking to the support guy about 6 months ago. ;)

See yaz!

Did anyone hear anything about something replacing the Q10 that would be worth waiting for???

They were (at one time) going to put out a device called the Q32. It was similar to the Q10, but with a few more features and higher specs. I don't know whatever happened to it. I guess they rethought the numbers on that one.

I have a new Q10 that I'm now getting familiar with, for live performance recording. I will very likely add a 2nd Q10 because I'm out of tracks when micing drummers.

Aardvark tech support is 100% responsive to my questions, and in a very timely manner.

As a computer consultant, I really dislike everything about Win98 and WinME. Win2000 is much better, but I'd advise going to XP for stability, which is the best MS has today. XP is a memory and cpu hog. A 256mb installation has 100mb free after the OS loads. IMO, 512mb is in order for serious work that consumes memory.