I think Firewire is more stable than USB. I currently record using USB and I have had problems where my PC drops the connection or the audio suddenly isn't full duplex. Reboot then everything works fine, but who wants to go through all that. I just finished putting a fresh 80 gig hard drive in so maybe that will help my problem but I really want to go to firewire. I think the Alesis MulitMix Firewire mixers look good but I don't know much about them.