I've reached the stage in life where I am happy with my guitar tone [i feel very alone... seems like noone else is] and my other hobby that brings me way more income than playing guitar is recording/editing/working with audio, mainly in the digital domain but I do live audio as well on the pretty professional level; [as in, I do sound at the biggest venue in town, and we get some big acts through here].

I don't get new gear often because I am snooty and willing to accept the fact that I enjoy expensive gear, and I stopped buying stuff to "get me by" long ago - I only make purchases now that I'll live with for a long time, which in turn means I don't get stuff too often.

My latest piece of gear is a FOCUSRITE ISA 828, which is an 8 channel mic pre using the ISA series preamps.

Let's start with the downsides:
-~the "optional" digital card. I know I have griped in the past because at the time I didn't need the digital card but now that I want it it's become a hindrance, costing around $600 to get these 8 channels of wicked tone into my protools rig. Now I know if it had come with the digital option, I would be griping even more about the price tag.
-~the freakin price, it was nearly $2900 after tax [though totally worth it, i'm a cheap mofo and generally only buy stuff on sale]
-~the output is a DB25, convenient for units that have that as an inpput however some like to put their gear through a patchbay so that they can insert gear, which means the cable cost an additional $95 to go from DB25 to 8 TRS.

The good????
~The tone, even from the DI. Plug a guitar or bass in, it doesn't sound like a guitar or bass through a di, it sounds like clean guitar. The variable impedance lets me go from thick to thin before I even get to eqing, and starting closer to the end result ALWAYS sounds more natural than eqing to get there.
The impedance switching is the best part of this preamp, it really lets me find each mics' proper load and makes everything sound as good as it can.
~It remembers my settings when I turn it off. It's not digital, but the interface for selecting impedance, input, phase, and hp filter is. And unlike my MOTU 2408, it remembers what I had it set to when it goes down for the night. Very handy for those multiple day sessions.
~Everything. It's hard to go on and on, but the sound that comes out of this thing is amazing. Ima gonna go and take a few photos of it, I'll post them soon.