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M-Audio Firewire Solo Sound Interface
 I bought this little thing so that I could take it, a laptop and my Focusrite TwinTrak Pro preamp out and be able to record in high quality stereo. It works. The Focusrite has an AD board in it, so it outputs via SPDIF, straight into the SPDIF input on the FW Solo. No sync problems, no driver issues. I am not operating at low latency, because I don't need to, I have heard that it suffers a bit if you do.
It has an XLR input to a microphone preamp, with switchable 48V phantom power, which I don't use, a high impedance instrument input, which I also don't use, and a heaphone plug with a separate volume control for direct monitoring. It has a total of 6 ins (2 line an SPDIF pair and the two on the front) and 4 outs (2 line and an SPDIF pair), of which you can run 4 and 4 simultaneously. It comes with a 4 pin and a 6 pin firewire cable, and a separate power supply, if you need the phantom, or like me have a laptop with only 4 pin firewire. 4 pin firewire is the same as 6 pin, but without the 2 pins which provide the buss power. With laptop battery life being what it is, I run my whole setup powered anyway if it is at all possible to.
For a bit of kit that costs very little it does a fine job, if you use external preamps and AD it is as good as any method for getting stuff into a laptop.
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