Hi i am setting up a home studio using a four bus mixer and a laptop. i am using cubase sx 3. I was looking at a soundcard with left and right inputs and left and right outputs. would it be possible to buy 2 of these soundcards to use 4 buses onto cubase? and would i be able to select each input onto a seperate track?

Or are there any USB soundcards which have 4 inputs and 4 outputs??

any help would be very much appreciated

In theory this would work, but that depends on the software design: whether it would allow multiple soundcards to be used. I would not do this, personally. Usually consumer audio cards don't have quarter inch inputs, plus it's nice to have built in pre's.

As an alternative, I would look into a USB Audio interface with built-in pre's other additional inputs. I'd personally make the switch to Pro Tools and get the M-Box2 Pro. You'd get 4 inputs (2 with built in Focusrite pre's), and 6 outputs. It uses USB 2.0 format, and gives you all kinds of monitoring capabilities: Headphones, studio monitors, plus an input monitor, very cool. This is a little spendy compared to your alternative at around $900 dollars.

Another option, if you don't want to make the Pro Tools jump just yet would be the M-Audio FastTrackPro. This would give you a similar, but less functional version of the M-Box. You would still be able to use Cubase, but would be able to change over to Pro Tools at a later time.

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