Latency With The M-audio 1814 Or Motu 828mkii, Question about recording latencies Options

[Supernaut]

Hello All

I've been doing PC recording using Linux in my home studio for a while now. Great sound, but I've had it with the latency. I've bought a G4 PowerBook (which is frickin' glorious btw) and I am evaluating the FireWire interfaces.

I need at *least* 5 input channels, so both the M-Audio 1814 and the MoTU 828mkII fit the bill perfectly. My question is, does anyone have any experience with these devices doing tracking and overdubbing in a studio setting? Let me explain my problem and what I want to achieve:

We are basically a hard rock and heavy metal band. We usually record the drums first, then the bass (1 or 2 tracks), then 2 rhythm guitar tracks, then leads and vocals. Usually, by the time I get to the leads, I have latency issues. I'll be playing back the recorded tracks, recording the lead in real time, and then when I play it all back I end up having to manually shift the lead and/or vocal tracks (and sometimes the other tracks) to the left to make up for the latency.

I've had it, I can't take it any more. I know some latency is unavoidable - how is it with these firewire interfaces? Any experiences? I've also recorded a lot to an ADAT and, while this mostly solves the latency issues, you only get 8 tracks and I *HATE* mucking around with tapes.

Note that I have very little use for post-processing (besides inter-track silliness ;-), nor is there much going on in the way of effects after the amps, no midi, etc., yet - I'm only interested in capturing live instruments for tracking. Perhaps there's a way to apply some sort of sync track to each individual track as in video engineering? Do some of the upper-level software packages have ways to accomodate this latency?

Suggestions welcome - both the 1814 and the 828mkII are in the price range I'm willing to spend.

Thanks in advance!

JB