[gen-xtargetmarket]

Yes, I knew what feature-set I was buying into when I purchased my 001, and this is not a complaint at all. Far from it.

Personally, I would love for Digi to develop an upgrade for the 001 that would enable users to have more physical digital and analog I/O. I only need the digital, but I'm sure others would like more analog I/O (although this can currently be accomplished with existing outboard A/D/D/A converters). The box I have in mind would allow for an additional 24 channels of ADAT Lightpipe I/O and then whatever other doodads would be necessary to appeal to the market and make this thing sell. Only 16 channels and some more analog I/O? I'm still buying one, maybe two, at that feature-set.

Perhaps a box that would accept the strange little SCSI-looking cable from the PCI card and then have a pass-through in order to connect to the existing 001 box? You could then daisychain a few of these boxes in order to increase your I/O options. This is probably not possible due to existing architecture, but I wouldn't know.
Better yet; a Digidesign Proprietary Firewire box so that 002 users would also benefit and then Digi would be able to target more users (and said user's $$$).

And to answer the marketing types as to why anyone would need this (let's put it to the marketing guys another way) or actually PAY for this; I use a digital mixer and no longer wish to suffer the losses of multiple D/A/A/D conversions. Not to mention having to adjust for the additional latency of the channels that are leaving the 001 through the analog outs.

Is it important to me? Yes. So much so, that I've been investigating competing developer's offerings and solutions as a possible alternative. I'm willing to drop up to $2000 with them, but would rather continue to invest with Digi as I've been with them for years. The migration wouldn't be too painful as the majority of plug-in developers now cater to the entire host processing market and some even ship all versions in each package.

If anyone else is interested, or has relevant comments, please let it be known.
And for all the wise-acres... notice that I said my budget was $2000 and is not quite up to ProTools|HD territory.

Thanks for the bandwidth,

gen-x