Bob, Mikes control surface certainly DOES work with vegas, among almost every other NLE and DAW.
The difference is that its running through LAN, not USB or Midi.
Sadly Sony have no interest into expanding into the kind of dimension, as we tried to offer controller defaults within the Vegas install. Much like the existing drop down cntroller options availabel today.
In additon the basic console starts at about 15k, so it might be beyond most peoples budgets considering the price of the NLE itself.

$15K?

Ouch.

Does it really need LAN for performance reasons?

BSW has The Alesis Control with motorized faders, 2 mic preamps and 6 mono line ins for $799. There is also a lower level which may or maynot be available yet with 2 mic preamps. It is firewire and appears to replace your sound card.

Ralph

If you can afford the price, go for the MCU.

The control surface facilities in Vegas are designed with the MCU in mind and whether you can use any other controller depends on how closely that controller can be made to emulate an MCU.

Some controllers that claim to have an MCU-compatible mode may only offer a partial emulation of the MCU and you may find that this doesn't include the functions that you would want to use.

Some controllers offer pretty much a full MCU emulation, but because the layout and number of buttons they provide is different from the real MCU they might be more awkward to use than a real MCU - some buttons may be in strange places and have to have multiple functions rather than the (mostly) one-button-per-function logical layout that the MCU provides. The BCF2000 is like this.

I have a BCF2000 and it works fine for the limited use I make of it as an amateur doing mostly audio work. But if I was earning money doing this stuff I would immediately buy myself an MCU - its just so much nicer to use.

The only other "controller" that I know of that is being used successfully with Vegas is the M-Audio ProjectMix which several people in the audio forum have reported works fine for them in its "MCU for Logic" mode. But the ProjectMix combines both a control surface and a multi-channel sound card in one unit so it is not a cheap alternative to the MCU (but it could be worth considering if you are also in the market for an audio interface). But the MCU-emulation provided is only partial so it still might not be suitable for the tasks you intend to use it for.

By the way, make sure that any controller you consider is really MCU compatible. You occasionally see controllers described as "Mackie compatible" and when you dig deeper you find that this means compatible with the Mackie HUI. The HUI is a different controller and has its own quite different way of working. Whilst it's a spendid piece of kit, with a very powerful command scheme, it works in a completely different way from the MCU and currently there is no way of using a HUI (or a controller that emulates it) with Vegas.

Mark