Well, I finally went and got my self a new audio interface. I was getting sick and tired of that Line 6 piece of shit I was using. Tone ports are good for guitar, but absolutely useless for anything else. You've been warned folks!

So, I managed to snag a nice Presonus Firepod (FP10) on ebay for dirt cheap, the preamps sound fantastic, and I can finally use my mics without having to spend an hour fiddling with gain and levels just to get a reasonable signal to noise ratio due to the noisy ass preamps on the line6 unit. My MPA gold tube mic pre also sounds great running into the FP10 now, I even picked up some nice mullard tubes for it to replace the cheap chinese ones it came with, haven't really given them a strong testing out yet to see how much they've affected the sound, but they don't sound any worse from my initial tests, so that's good :). At high gain they do seem to have more warmth.

Maybe now i'll finally do some songs with vocals, hmm?

The only thing my little home studio is missing now is a nice hardware compressor and a nice hardware delay/reverb unit. Compressor is not so much a big deal, but a hardware delay/reverb unit would be great. I love reverb and delay effects but they really eat up processor cycles. A dedicated hardware unit would really free up some processing power for other stuff!