That's very interesting about the vs880 operating structure. In the end I did not see the point of duplicating hardware that was already there in my laptops. As you, I did not see myself doing much wave multitracking, and if I wanted to record vocals, a digitech is probably as good as I need. So the usb route was the most cost effective because you just record a 44.1 wavefile direct to the laptop ready for manipulation and burning, no analogue degradations to worry about. It is easy to put a vocal wave on top, if you want to, and put it together in Cool Edit or Sound Forge. And I already had the dat machines, so S/PDIF conversion was a bonus.

The only area that concerned me about the straight sound from the 6500 was that it was not always possible to emulate the 'punch' of a retail cd, since keeping the dynamics away from distortion sometimes kept the mean levels low. This was down to compression more than anything, so very subtle manipulation of the peak/mean ratios in parts of a song could improve things to sound quite good. But most of everything else can be achieved in the 6500 mixer, with only slight tweaking needed externally for my ears.

Maybe no-one does a simple stereo hard disk recorder where you just cable the result to pc digitally because of this route, and because you can buy audio cd burners, dat, or a variation thereon. Certainly your experiences with editing on the vs880 are similar to the prospect of putting wave editing etc on a keyboard. It will be difficult to get the ease of use and flexibilty of doing it in windows with a mouse!