[yoursickstudio]

"You post really caught my eye. In the signal flow, would you be able to use the Mini-Me to do a D/A conversion as well? I'm also trying to come up with alternatives of not using the 002 preamp and its conversions."

Ok the bad thing :
the mini-me is a ADC not a DAC.
If digidesign would ever let LE users use other hardware (which they won't) than yes because if you use the mini-me as a USB soundcard you can actually have a monitor return thru the little aux stereo jack in the back.

if you want a good dac you'll need the mini-dac.

i think the mini-dac and the mini-me (both without usb options) is a bit around the same price of a rosetta 200 (there is a mini-me type version with just preamps no adc if you want to use a preamp with a rosetta)

i have the dac and the mini-me (and both with usb options installed).
i love them both because i can even use them together on my powerbook if i want to do recordings on location.

The thing is your recordings will be better and you'll have a good clock... so if a friend has a good dac , borrow that one... but if you stay in the box, you'll still get the better sound out of the digi002 outputs.
What you avoid with the mini-me is Much Less Jitter during recording and during summing. And since most people do bounce in the box it doesn't matter the lesser DAC. You can always take your audio tracks to a studio for mixdown

the mini-dac (or benchmark dac : different brand) is just a better digital to analog converter... the apogee's dac use double buffer stage for cleaning up the signal before turning it into analog. Another use for this is hooking it up to a cd-player with s/pdif or lightpipe ... now you'll hear how it is made for you to hear instead of the cheap dacs in your cd player (there are big and good brand with excellent cd-players... have you ever seen a HI-FI nerd ? that world is huge also )