Mackie onyx firewire card

[demodoc]

I would like to hear of anyone's experience with this card used with SAWstudio. As stated in my other recent post, we are setting up a SAwstudio system in a coffee house where we are using the Onyz 1640 console already so this would seem to be a very cool way to be able to get 16+ tracks into Sawstudio. Anyone?

[DominicPerry]

Bad bad bad.

I have a 1220. It sounds ok.
The firewire card is a dog. It's years old, has antiquated specs (S/N ~95dB), but worst of all, Mackie only ever got one version of the XP driver out, v1.0.0. The driver does work, sometimes at low latency too, but often it doesn't. The connection to the mixer will just disappear. I have to disconnect the firewire cable and reconnect and/or turn the mixer off and on again.
I believe Echo made the f/w card for Mackie and then they fell out, so there's no chance of an update. It doesn't and won't ever work with Vista. Mackie won't talk about it, their forums are full of people whining about it, wanting to hear just one drop of information from Mackie, which they never get. Clearly, some people do use it successfully, but for me the dodgy connection and the occasional two-second sine tone in the middle of a session pretty much rule it out. It has pretty coloured knobs on it though.

Dominic

[demodoc]

Oooooohhhhh:(

Too bad. It LOOKS like an elegant solution...lots of tracks etc.

How about the Presonus FP 10 or Firestudio Project??