Feature:
No frills features. Would have liked an XLR input.

Quality:
It's made of metal ... need I say more?

Value:
Good value. A neat little box for the money.

Desirability:
This question is a little weird :-). I like the product, but sex appeal??

Sound:
I was pleasantly surprised to hear the quality of the sound of my acoustic guitar when recorded through this product --- the aardvark's guitar preamp produced a warm, rich acoustic sound.

Overall:
I think for the time being this product will serve nicely in conjuction with my laptop recording. It's portable, made well, and sounds great.

I'm primarily a singer/songwriter, and, since I'm in a position where I have no room and no cash for a DAW like Roland's VS-1680, I bought this to record songs and to produce CDs off my laptop. This thing sounds REALLY sweet to my ears, to the point where I think I've entered a whole new realm of pc recording, and even got it to make friends with the shareware multitracking software that I have (I even got it to record 24 bit wave files with my copy of Cool Edit 2000. Just know that on top of all the other parameters Aardvark suggests, a REALLY fast hard drive is also paramount (I had to upgrade my hard drive capabilities from my internal 4300 rpm to an external Firewire Drive that has 7200 rpm). Also, this thing sucks a LOT of resources off your laptop, so be prepared to tweak your system (activate the DMA system on your hard drive, resize your virtual memory, reduce the colors on your monitor, reorganize the IRQ's in your system etc.) to prevent all those clicks and dropouts you may experience when you first plug this bad boy in, especially if you play back alot of samples/waves in your multitrack software (ran into trouble after playing back 5 tracks). I still get an occasional click during playback, but the recording's are smooth as molasses. Also, despite what Aardvark says, you can play midi files, but you must use the MS GM wave table synth, or the MIDI mapper. Any other driver will not work. You also cannot convert midi files to wave files using this external soundcard either. It is, as they say, strictly audio.

With those caveats in mind, I say, have fun with this. It sounds great and it's certainly worth beyond what I paid for it here as this site. :)

No, it doen't offer XLR inputs or phantom power, and the mic pre-amp works best with "hotter"-output dynamic mics, but it is CLEAN. If you just need to get analog signals into the digital environment with a minimum of added noise, this is a great little box.

This cool. It lets me record on my laptop and gets MUCH BETTER SOUND than what the crappy laptop comes with. I use it with the Guitar Tracks software which is perfect. I may upgrade later. The guitar EFR input sounds much better than anything I currently have, which was a total shocker. I love this thing.

yeah it sounds better than what comes built-in with the laptop, but that's no standard to go by. This box send a weak signal, and randomly decides to quit and forgets how to relay sound every so often.