Hello! Welcome in the forum, enjoy your stay!

Unfortunately I have to inform you that your EMU 1820 is not supported on the Mac :-( I think that's because it neeeds an additional PCI card, and especially the Intel-Macs don't support PCI anymore (OSx86 does). For older interfaces like the RME Hammerfall 9636 were only PowerPC drivers available. I'm now using M-Audio USB/Firewire interfaces (I have three), they're perfectly supported on the Mac. M-Audio Interfaces are also interesting because you also can use ProTools M-Powered with them, no other interface is able to run ProTools. And with less than 300 USD ProTools M-Powered is an effordable sequenzer. I'm working with Logic 8 and Amadeus Pro, an easy-to-use multitrack-capable wave editor.

The rest of your hardware should be OK for OSx86, but I'm not the guy who can help you with Intel hardware. I would say, test OSx86 on your computer, especially before planning to buy a real Mac. Perhaps you don't like OS X at all. If you like it and want to change you have to change the audio interface. A device which could match the E-MU 1820 is the M-Audio ProFire 610. I'm owning the ProFire Lightbridge and the USB Transit as replacement for the onboard-sound which is often rather crappy and only in 48 kHz/16bit. Although OS X handles audio much better than Windows: In Cubase with ASIO I had a combined input and output latency of about one second. So it was impossible to play an virtual instrument with a keyboard using gameport MIDI. In OS X I used the same onboard chip, an external midi interface and the programm Mainstage, a part of the Logic package which can play EXS24 instruments, similar to VST instruments. But there was no latency! OS X doesn't need this ASIO stuff, it uses CoreAudio and CoreMIDI which is already a part of the operating system, so it's much faster. The OS also supports AU's (Audio units), something like VST plugins, directly. Often plugins are available as AU and VST at the same time.

From where are you? If you have problems with English, we have a lot of members from all over the world.

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2 Opteron systems: OSx86 10.5.8, Andy's 9.8.0 kernel, Asus A8N-SLI Premium, Opteron 185 o'clocked @ 2 x 2,95 GHz (2nd system 2.6 GHz), ATI Radeon HD2600XT 256MB Dual-Monitor 2x HP L2035, 4 GB RAM, Griffin FireWave as main audio device, Marvell + nForce LAN, Asus U3S6 USB3/SATA6 card, 5,5 TB harddisk, Firewire 800 card, Apple Remote + eHome IR receiver, 2x Wacom serial graphics tablet, Canon Pixma iP4700, Logitech Internet Navigator wireless keyboard/mouse combination.

My Audio stuff: M-Audio Transit USB (default audio), M-Audio ProFire 610, M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge (34 channels) using Creamware A16 ADAT converter • MIDI: M-Audio Midiman 4x MIDI interface • Behringer Audio Mixers: Xenyx 1002, Xenyx 1002FX, Xenyx 1202FX, Eurorack UB1002FX, Eurorack MX1804FX, Eurorack MX262A • FX devices: Lexicon MPX100 DSP, Behringer DSP-1000 Virtualizer, Behringer MiniFEX 800 DSP, Behringer Multicom Pro MDX4400 compressor • RETRO: MSSIAH midi/sequencer/synthesizer cardridge for the C64 (Dual-SID), Steinberg M.S.I. MIDI Interface for C64