Mbox Vs. Digi 002 Rack Options

[JPSpecial]

I'm wondering which audio interface would be better for my needs. I'd like to record voice and acoustic guitar using two different mics and afterward doing some harmony vocals and perhaps a second guitar track and some bass. The real problem I want to avoid is major latency. Will I have substantially less with the firewire digi 002r than with the mbox. Some users have said that the latency with mbox is not a problem while others have said it is a true annoyance. Just wondering what some of you users of either audio interface have to say. Also, how many audio inputs can the digi 002r take at a time? I know the mbox can only take two, which of course is pretty limited.

[bjkiwi]

this is only an issue with the MBox on the Mac. I emailed digidesign support (asia/pacific as I am in Australia) and got this reply:

"This is a common sence. If you do any hard drive recordings, you can not avoid latency. This is not just ProTools issue. It's the same on all other HDD recording devices. Please research the web about the latency. Visit www.google.com and type in
LATENCY. If you are using Mbox. Here is the work around for latency. -Mute the recoding track and set the Mix knob on Mbox to blend input source and the playback sound."

to which I replied:

Thank you for your reply but you've missed my point. I'm not talking about monitoring latency as I do understand that is a given with computer based recording. What I am refering to is the fact that once a track, or tracks, is recorded it ends up playing back 164 samples late. It appears it is only an issue with Macs.

they replied again with:

"This is the latency anyways but this one was considered as a bug, and had been fixed in PTLE6.4. Please check the update information here.
http://www.digidesign.com/support/cs
Sorry about the inconvenience.

so in the end they've admitted it was a bug that has been fixed in 6.4