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Hi there audio pros.

This is a bit of an enquiry, bit of a rant. I am your typical musician/home studio recordist so I do my recording on a PC using mid priced / low end hardware. It seems at first glance that my sort are well catered for these days with a plethora of cheap USB and firewire interfaces, but I really struggle to find one that meets my needs, and it leaves me wondering who they are designed for.

Firstly, they all seem to top out at 8 XLR mic inputs. This seems a bizarre number to me. My recording sessions fall into one of two categories: either layering/building/overdubbing in which case one would be enough; or recording my entire band in which case the horn section and vocals alone use up 6 of those 8 before I've even thought about the drums. So 8 xlrs seems right in the middle of the two ends of usefulness, too many for solo recording but just not quite enough for the band.

Then there's the monitoring. The interfaces I've seen tend to have an input level control and then some overall balance pot between live and playback sound. I find this fairly useless, as the only control over individual monitor levels also changes the level sent to the recorded track. So you get everyone mic'd up, set the levels nicely and then the bass player says 'just a little more of me in the cans please' but you can't give him what he wants without the recorded bass track suddenly getting louder.

Now I did find one piece of kit that answered all my problems and still falls into the price category I'm working in: Phonic Helixboard 24. Stop laughing at the back - I know this thing has a poor rep in this NG but it actually does give me what I need: 16 xlr inputs all sent to the computer individually over firewire. And because it is a full blown mixing desk I can adjust the input gain to get the required recording level and then set the players' individual monitors on the faders.

But this thing is firewire only, and it's getting pretty impossible now to find a laptop with firewire (or even expresscard so you can add one). I need to find some hardware that does what the helixboard 24 does but over USB. Now you can get a USB version of the helixboard and this may be what I end up buying, but I would really like to consider some alternatives. But all my googling and searching just turns up the kind of interfaces I previously described: 8 xlrs, crap monitoring, and for 'USB mixers' it is nearly always the case that only the stereo mixdown is sent over the USB, not the individual tracks.

So I'd appreciate any insights anyone may have on what is out there, and who uses these 8 input devices and is there some trick that I'm missing with respect to the monitoring? Because I find it hard to believe that there are so many devices out there following the same (imo) flawed formula.

many thanks,
TWJ.