I have recently been moving more towards a hardware setup and looking to purchase some rack equipment. The main two things I am looking for at the moment are an 8x8 MIDI interface and a multiple in/out audio interface to hook up all my hardware synths to.

In looking around, I have noticed that some quality brands, such as MOTU and RME, have some older equipment about being sold at much cheaper than newer models due to them having a parallel/serial port rather than USB/FireWire to hook up to the PC. An example is how cheap the MOTU 2408 Mk3 or 828 Mk1 are compared to the 828 Mk3. From looking at MOTU and RME sites, it seems like the drivers are built in a consecutive and inclusive manner, meaning they work for older equipment and updated to allow newer stuff to also work. This suggests the older hardware should work with latest drivers.

In looking around, I noticed there are fairly cheap parallel/serial port to USB adapters/converters on sites like eBay and Amazon. I'm just wondering whether using these with the hardware would work, as my Windows 10 Pro 64 bit machine doesn't have any hardware parallel or serial ports, as is the case with pretty much all newer machines.

Are they likely to work? Or is there any certain audio/MIDI protocols used that the adapters/converters may not handle? The adapters seems to be advertised as working with Windows 10 with full drivers for them etc.

Trying to get some advice, thoughts and opinions before I consider investing in anything.

Cheers for any help anyone can input!