Funnily enough I'm selling a D24 + two Dsp farm cards (email me if you want to trade!). If you have a mix core card, this is the only card you'll need, it comes with 6 dsp chips, which on a smallish 32 track session will be allocated as follows: 1 chip - mix engine 1 chip - mixer (this may spill onto a second chip depending on routing) 4 chips - plugins. This is an ok system (I have a Mix+ now), the problems really are that some plugins will only run on certain chips (mainly the reverb ones), using direct connect takes a whole chip, and plugins don't really share dsp chips - so once a single instance has 'grabbed' the chip only the same plugin will run on it - there are exceptions to this though. With a Mix system you can elect to run 64 track sessions which will take an extra dsp chip. The D24 card has much lower dsp, all it allows you to do is to run a 32 track mix engine, you'll still need dsp cards (either DSP farms, or Mix farms) to run a session as the D24 card has dsp to run the mix engine, but no dsp to run the mixer or plugins. Apart from that there is little difference, a D24 + Mix farm will let you do the same as a Mix core, but you'll have slightly more DSP (depending on the card order you can still run 64 tracks with this too). My advice would be to go for a D24 system with either a few DSP farms, or a D24 + Mix farm and maybe a few DSP farms it depends on the number of slots you have, and what you really want to do. This is how I started off, D24 + dsp farm, then expand as usage/budget allows - cheapest way to do it in my book. In summary, the only real difference is that in standard trim, a Mix core may well be all you need, whereas the D24 card also needs atleast one other DSP card (but this can be the cheap DSP farm). The D24 can be expanded at a later date, or upgraded by Digi come to that, to equal what a Mix farm will give you. Hope this helps - let me know if there's anything else I can do. Pete