well pick yer poison ;P
http://www.thomann.de/intl/digital_converters.html
but with adc it's really cheap or good. Sorry, @Bunford !

 

I use TC Electronic BMC-2 as DA for RME HDSP 9652. http://www.tcelectronic.com/bmc-2/ It's cheap [200-250 euro] and absolutely wonderfully sounding DA. It sits next to my keyboard on the desktop. It's so handy to have a volume control within arm's reach as you often need it. It also has a great VU meter.

AMD chipset based motherboards work better with PCI cards [a tad lower latency] as they have native support for PCI slots that Intel dropped in their recent chipsets [~3-4 years recent]. That's one of the reasons why I went with AMD PC. I plan on buying another RME HDSP 9652 when 3 ADAT input pairs start being not enough for my needs. Thankfully there are still lots of motherboards with 2 PCI slots or 3 being produced.

 

Luckily I contacted the seller and I was the only one that bid. They understood and immediately cancelled and refunded for me. They also had a 9632 they will be listing shortly too so will be keeping my eye out

 

Go for the PCI-E . PCI Is Legacy

 

I really think that is a great decision. I am preaty sure that RME HDSP 9632 has better converters than any of these low budget standalone DA units, this is a serious card, a lot of pro composers use it. And, as I said, whole package for around 200-250eur...used ofc...although, you need to buy separate breakout cables if you want balanced outputs, for another 30-50eur, used or new (if the offer is without it, that is...). But believe me, it's worth it, amazingly solid card.

HDSPe AIO is 550eur new, and very very rarely you will find it used. I picked up one from uk ebay for 350eur without brakeout cable. So it's either 600eur with breakout cables new, or 400eur used. But if you plan to upgrade the system soon, maybe you should think about it.

One thing to mention, very often problem with AIO...some system noise on the headphones and unbalanced outputs, I have it too, and I'am trying to deal with that at the moment. It's not from the card but the card is sensitive to system intereference...Never had that problem with 9632, but...what can you do

 

Last edited: Feb 13, 2016

as I ve said before I own an Hammerfall and a Digiface 3x adat on a Mac Pro
soon I m going to move to a PC and maybe I ll get this one RME HDSPe RAYDAT € 563 4 ADAT
it seems to me a good deal for the price and I like RME's reliability.

 

i got both rme versions running, the 9652 pci and the aio pcie. i'd recommend pcie, you get significantly lower latencies than the pci version, plus there might be motherboards in the near future without pci.
as rme isn't too cheap it's important to have it run for quite some time.
good thing about rme is: they used to support their hardware for ages. i never had to drop rme hardware for lack of driver support of new os.
(and i had to trash quite a lot of interfaces the last 10 years because of other a***ole companies).

usb nowadays isn't as bad as it used to be. you should be able to get about 3ms latency with a modern usb interface. But if you're not in for notebook and portable recording, go for pcie (imho)

oh, i forgot to mention: the pcie card uses less cpu with the same projects, don't know why

 

I got myself a RME RayDAT PCIe together with an ADI-2 from RME. The RayDAT ist very fast and reliable. I use the ADI-2 as my main monitor an my main recording AD converter. The other 3 optical IOs are either used for some cheap 8ch ADA8000s from Behringer or in SPDIF mode for some other external digital devices.
The TotalMix stuff is very usefull when you do all your recording monitoring ITB. In my case i have a nice little external mixer mainly for making i nice monitor mix for the artist in front of the mic. Here i also have external FX units connected to the mini mixer....etc...etc.

I bought the RayDAT because my old Hammerfall 9652 (without DSP) wasn't supported anymore and wouldn't get a 64Bit driver for modern OSses. Also the RayDAT has a PCIe interface, which is more future proof i assume...hehe.
You should go with that...not the older 9652 HDSP...hehe.