Geoff_Wood says he has the 18 channel phonic and it works well.
I am chosing the Phonic over Alesis because of price and the sweepable mid eq. Also, obviously the FW24 is 16 mic pre channels twice as many as the top alesis FW and it has Direct outs on the mixer as well as the ever important insert. The alesis doesn't have inserts or direct outs.
I had a Phonic 1705 (I think) a few years back and it was super clean and didn't sound too bad.
From what I can see the best you can do with the Alesis is 8 mic pres!
The inserts don't do much for me for recording. The individually switchable phantom power does. The generally better build of Alesis is a factor to consider, then again moving more upmarket there's the Onyx 1640....
Keep us informed, I'm tempted to buy something and as you've found hard reviews are pretty light on the ground.
don' know about phonic but alesis feeds a/d converters with post eq, post fader source. so recording depends on mix and eq. i made small internal modification to feed firewire a/d converters with post gain, pre eq source. if i set gain properly, i can eq and mix with no affection on recording. now it is good value for money recording mixer.