My band is about to record a 10 song demo and we are faced with a big decision about which recording rig to use.

I have a rig consisting of 3 20 bit ADATs, a Tascam M-1516 mixer, several RNCs and other decent compressors, Drawmer noise gates, several Digitech TSR-24 and Lexicon reverbs, several Rane SP-15 parametric EQs, and some other good quality rack gear.

The other guitarist has a Akai DSP16, which appears to have about the same capabilities with all processing done internal to the DSP16.

My main concerns about the DSP16 are:

-There are no inserts, so have to use its compressors and verbs. How do they sound?

-Also only 2 mic inputs, and not sure about the quality of even those 2 mic preamps. I have good outboard mic preamps that I could connect to its line level inputs I guess, but that is likely a longer signal path than mic preamp to ADAT.

-Is there a way to get the multi track data out of the DSP16 in case we want to have it mixed/refined/whatever in a pro studio? I couldn't find anything in the manual on that. Obviously that is easy with ADATS and lightpipe.

-I have never used the DSP16, I am sure there is a learning curve, and I will be the engineer on the project. The other guy has only made a couple of rough demos on the DSP16 and they sound terrible, although a lot of that is his skill using it I am sure.

So which rig to use? I am leaning toward the ADATs, but if there was a compelling advantage for the DSP 16 I would learn it.