***Softsynth only people, or people that like the spend tons of money, please skip to another post, this only pertains to people recording outboard gear***

Seems that there are quite a bit of misconceptions regarding recording on sound cards and what to get for a high quality/mid range cost equipment. To get the highest quality recording you need an external Analog to Digital converter. Those housed on sound cards are good, but can never be as good as dedicated external gear because they don't have the noisy PC environment to deal with and aren't limited on space or power consumption.

I'm not versed in firewire or USB devices so I wont comment on them.

So, it seems, for best quality without spending a shitload of money on a dedicated DAW we should use an external A/D converter and run it digitally (spdif for my 24/96 audiophile) to the sound card. Pro studios often have racks and racks of dedicated high end A/D converters. For our purposes (recording EDM and not bands) we only need 2 channels.

So does anyone here use a dedicated 2 channel A/D converter like the M-Audio Flying Cow, Focurite, or Apogee Rosetta 200? What are your thoughts? What about cheating and using a high quality effects processor (like the TC electronics M-One XL) as your A/D converter?

So the cheapest solution, while maintaining the highest quality is to buy a cheap sound blaster (48k+) spdif in sound card and get an external converter.