Mike,

Once you get into more than just a couple of channels, you will find that most manufacturers are using USB 2.0, at least that is my unscientific analysis of the situation. I quickly perused ye good olde Sweetwater Catalog - which has a really nice interface comparison chart in it - I would recommend getting this catalog JUST for this one chart. In the Winter 2013 catalog it's on page 349. It can help you to weed out stuff you aren't interested in.

M-Audio are another company rather well known for keeping up their drivers. The Fast Track Pro was a great interface that is now legacy and supported by AVID only. However, it has Win8 drivers on the AVID site. I did learn something today, M-Audio is no longer affiliated with Avid and they have a new product lineup that is separate from the old M-Audio product lineup.

I did have one issue with my Presonus FireBox - there was bleed from the on-board headphone circuit into the analog input stage. You can actually hear this at the 3:55 and following fade out of this song where the click track pokes it's way into the recording: https://soundcloud.com/rockstar_not/scott-lake-rest-ye-orion

Note, I was not using any mics in this song, so if you immediately suspected headphone speaker bleed into a mic - that was not happening. It happened internally inside the FireBox. I had it ruin more than one recording. There was also a high pitched whine that would happen on high input signal gains (no not feedback) now and then. I found out about both of these issues after my 1-year warranty expired. PreSonus did not want to replace or repair my unit.

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