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

What it sounds like you need is one of the following:

An M-Audio Fast Track Pro available for about $250. Here you will have a couple of pre's built in.

But the most viable solution would be to make the Pro Tools Jump and get yourself an Mbox 2 Pro. This will run you anywhere from $800 to $900 depending on what you get with it. This, however, puts you into the Pro Tools world which is a good place to be, plus it has 4 inputs and 6 outputs.

Motu has some products to look at as well, but those are my reccomendations. They will provide near zero latency and will suit your application as far as USB Audio Interfaces.

You should be able to cascade as many devices as your laptop will handle. The software will recognize that there are two devices with two inputs each. They can be the same device or different, as long as they're compatible with your software.

There are a few USB devices with four I/Os. Most common one is the M-Audio Quattro. They're hard to find anymore except on online auctions.

Also there's the Tascam US144 that you might look into.

The reason there aren't many 4-I/O devices out there is probably because four channels over a USB connection pushes the quality of the audio. But so far my Quattro has held up.