Help chosing new sound card and accesories

[hammeraman]

Hello

I'm looking to replace my current sound card, Echo Layla 3G.

I play all variations of rock/ metal
I use Cakewalk's Sonar, running on Win7 64bit.

What I use / need the card to do:

- Record vocals (with phantom power)
- Record MIDI (Drums, Keyboard)
- Record optical S/PDIF
- Record guitar/ bass direct in

I'm looking for a stable solution, as I'm experiencing alot of drop outs with my Echo.
PCIe and 192kHz would also be prefereble.

I have looked at the following:

Sound card, RME HDSPE AIO
AD/DA converter, RME ADI 2
Pre amp, ART TPS II

But I don't know if it will be overkill, seeing as I'm only "recording" the vocals.
Would the above setup make a DI guitar signal sound better than a sound card with a breakout box?

[RawDepth]

Welcome to the site, hammeraman.

So many new interfaces now-a-days sound great. It is getting hard to tell the difference between the cheap ones and the good ones. Even the cheap ones sound decent if you use them correctly.

I do own an older RME HDSP pci card. I absolutely love it. It is stable, reliable, and superb quality. I will someday upgrade to a RayDat. But they don't have any preamps built-in though. It is just a multi-channel interface. I prefer it that way because I have several different analog preamps that I can run into it to fill a variety of tasks.