Dan, can you qualify the quality of the recordings made on the Presonus interface? That's an option I might look into in the future and it has to be the highest quality as I am working mostly with choirs, soloists, and cold instruments, classical/church music (not to be confused with classic rock)?

Is Adobe Audition fully supported out of the box and which version are you using? I see that Presonus comes with Cubase... I really don't need yet another software to learn...

I have a Sony Vaio laptop (P4 @ 2.4 GHz) with 512 RAM and built-in firewire that works fine for capturing even HDV... can anyone make a guess whether it will work with this puppy?

Thanks,

Jumping in ... while I don't have personal experience with the Presonus, I see on their site it comes with both ASIO and WDM drivers and Audition 2.0 fully supports both driver models. I think it's safe to say the two will work together without any problem. I know I can use all 8 channels in my Echo AudioFire 8 in Audition 2.0 without any problems. The only issue I see is Audition lists 512meg RAM as the minimum required with 1 gig recommended so you may want to upgrade the memory in your laptop.

Recording
 

Ervin,

Since you are going to be using a 12 channel DAT machine you should try to capture each of the four singers mics as well as the recorded audio on an individual track. You can do this by using the direct out of the each of the theaters main mixer that these are plugged into.

By doing this, you can control the mix at post and you are not stuck with the way the mix was set for the live mix. Sometimes what sounds good for the live mix does not sound good for recorded audio.