This unit has tons of flexibility and can easily be a centerpiece in a home studio (or any studio).

8 awesome mic pres or line ins, 8 channels of summing, analog inserts, pristine AD converters with AES digital and ADAT optical connections back to your DAW. This can serve many tracking and mix summing needs.

Here's some more information from Crane Song's site...

Spider is a high quality eight channel mic-preamplifier mixer with two types of digital outputs: stereo and eight channel. The stereo output is for recording engineers who do stereo or multi-channel recording and want a very flexible audio path. The eight channel output allows the system to function as an analog front end for DAWs, digital mixers, and modular digital recorders.

In addition, the stereo bus can be assigned to digital channels seven and eight. This allows a stereo mix of six channels to be assigned to digital outs seven and eight and leaves two channels independent. (eg. drums; kick, snare, and stereo left to right.) The Spider features include:

    * Six to 66dB input preamp gain in 6dB steps

    * Channel level control

    * Pan control for stereo output bus

    * +48v phantom power switching

    * Line/Mic switch

    * Phase switch

    * Low cut filter

    * Stereo bus assignment switch

    * Fat amp switch for a fuller sound

    * 16 segment meter peaking reading 0=clipping referenced to the A/D convertor

    * Clip light on the pre-amp section

    * Peak limiter for the A/D convertor

    * Channel insert point may be used as a pre-amp output

    * Sample rate to 192KHz

    * WC input and output

    * Switch selectable Analog Dither control, 15 to 24 bits

    * DSP analog tape emulation, adjustable by channel

    * Digital output as AES (192KHz), and ADAT Optical (96KHz)

The maximum analog level at the insert points is +25 dBm. Both the discrete class A pre-amp and the convertor modules are of a very high quality, low noise design. Applications for the Spider include (but are not limited to) live stereo recording, multi-channel recording, broadcast engineering, DAW front end, Off-line signal processing and stereo submixing.