You clearly have never recorded, mixed and mastered a 100+ piece symphony orchestra.

16 channels of 24/96 is not going to cut it for professionals.

Solid State Logic makes a PCIe card that does 128-channels at 24/96 and you can use up to 6 of them together which yields 768 channels. Other units offer 192KHz resolution.

If this is my life's work, I am going to settle for nothing less than the best. Until some serious changes happen, Linux and BSD are just not options for professionals who care about the quality of their work.

This is extremely unfortunate because I would like to have all of my work available to me in open formats so that I can use any part of it at any point in the future. All the sessions I did in grad school in Logic aren't available to me unless I start using proprietary software. And while I was in school, I either had to use proprietary software or not get the work done and not graduate which really wasn't much of an option.

Agreed. Driver support amongst studio quality interfaces is severely lacking and limits your options significantly.

So, it's just like real life then.

Do you hear a beat there? Regardless as to whether or not some ppl might hear a beat in Metastasis, my point was that there are pieces that don't have a beat and I still think that is the case. There are too many bizarre pieces by guys like LaMonte Young and Wolfgang Schorn. I would argue that even something like Wolfgang Rihm's 8th string quartet has no beat.