Thats a pretty small box, I wonder if there are heat issues?

I'm with Link on this. ART products, on a whole, are not known for having pristine sound quality or particularly robust reliability. A tube box with THAT many channels in THAT small a footprint may very well have some "issues" with heat dissipation. I'd give it a year or so of production before shelling out the $$ to buy one. Especially if this friend at the NAMM show is a dealer trying to generate some spin on future sales. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that ANY ART product would "sound amazing"...what was it being compared to?

They were running it side by side with a Focusrite octopre.

However I havent heard much about that unit either.

Is it even a decent front end?

That's what I thought: they chose another mediocre quality piece to compare it with. At least ART doesn't shy away from the fact that they are a "budget" product. With Focusrite, they have used their good name and past history to tout and then dumped the Platinum series on the market to cash in on. Those whores... :lol: Neither product is very good...