Focusrite makes some nice little ones, the soft is bit simpler but still with quite some features and if you need the DSP option one of the small ones comes with it. It all depends in what is within reason, from my point of view focusrite sounds a bit better than motu but the software of motu has a lot of power in some applications, preamps are quite better but you said that shouldn't be a factor. I have read the clock in ff are quite nice, which is a weak point in many cheap and not so cheap sound cards.
FWIW I have a FF liquid 56 but I was looking for a motu at the time, I found this one really cheap second hand in really good condition so I got it and I really like it. I have a friend who had a few motu and I worked with them a few times, but never had a comparison side by side, I may be wrong, but I still really like how this one works, and the difference with my old m-audio is huge, still latency much much higher than with the m-audio, not a problem for tracking since you always can use the mixer it has on board, but could be a problem if you want to add some processing to the player. That's when DSP may came handy. Still YMMV and I never put a lot of effort trying to lower it, it's a firewire device and I have a PCI/PCIe bridge so it could potentially add some more latency, but it's sooooooo much cheaper than a proper PCIe board than I couldn't justify it (a proper PCIe here cost as much as my mother and I don't have a crappy one)
JS
