Naintriga lang talaga ako dun sa preamp emulation nung Line6 kse. At the price, it seemed like a practical compromise hehe
In all fairness to Line6, it is. They have gone on to release the KB37 keyboard controller with the same UX2 preamps, plus their UX8 eight-channel preamp with USB 2.0 connectivity. Given a choice, I would go for the UX8.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while it's nice to have a choice in preamps and interfaces, it can get rather unwieldy having to juggle around several audio interfaces, all of them being stereo I/O. Add to the fact that ASIO can address only one physical interface at a time (for best latency performance), the juggling act can get old pretty quick. The UX2 offers an easy way to record guitars into your pc; most pci soundcards do not have that capability and most cards with preamps do not have an instrument/DI input capability - several interfaces have since come out with guitar input capability, the UX2 included.
I know what it's like having more than one interface in the same pc (1820m and DS2416). With asio, I can only use one or the other but not both simultaneously, but the DS2416 offers that sexy 02R compression in it's DSP along with other fx, I can use it as an outboard processor of sorts since it has control software that allows me to operate it independently of the 1820m.
In a nutshell, if you are going to add a new interface, just make sure that it adds capability to your system. Make sure to judge its merits carefully if all you're adding is only a stereo pair of I/O; I'd be more inclined to get 4 or more channels of I/O, although the guitar capable input does give one added features, though.
hth,
