Hi Tim

In my own experience using SX, I have the best of both worlds as far as Midi and Audio are concerned. My observations on syncing to the Roland are that it actually does not run to true clock time. I made an album in 2002 where all the additional instrumentation and vocals were recorded elsewhere by the musicians themselves - some vocals and guitars were both recorded on seperate VS880s and I had a great deal of trouble when I lined the recordings up as they both consistently played faster than the source (interestingly by the same proportion, requiring a time compression of 0.992). The recordings that were made on computers were completely accurate, even though some were recorded on Cakewalk/PC or Logic/MAC. I did a project last week where I bounced the midi backing track to DAT and imported the audio file via Cool Edit Pro and it was 100% accurate to the timing of the original Cubase SX Project, so my initial advice would be to go computer only with the software that you are happiest running.

Sync problems are the biggest pain to overcome, so if they can be avoided then do so (I used to waste hours in the studio trying to sort out this sort of thing and the problems were never consistent.)

In regards to the Yamaha DSP card and the 20/24bit question, the answer lies in what you want to hear. If you can perceive the difference in quality recording at 24 bit, go for that.

Of course it will all get dithered down to 16 bit 44.1/48k anyway, so personally, I can't see the point. It uses more memory in terms of data size, so more CPU power is required just to run the higher bandwidth. I find that project management, for me, is easy to calculate on the 10Mb/minute rule rather than the 15 for 24 bit.

Monitor-wise, the best you can afford has to be the way to go as the more clearly you can hear it, the easier it is to fix/mix.