Tascam US-144

Yesterday, I completely had it. I wanted to exercise a particulary troublesome guitar part by entering it through MIDI, then play along while gradually increasing the speed.

So, I connected the Yamaha keyboard. It took a while to locate the correct cable while fumbling around under my desk. It was evening so it was almost pitch black under my desk. After eating half a bucket of dust, I located the cable and hooked up my keyboard. I carefully entered and quantized all the notes and played them back through my on-board soundcard. So far, so good.

Next step: hook up my Pod XT Live. After eating the other half bucket of dust, I located the USB cable and hooked up the Pod XT. Of course, I had to restart my sequencing software because I have to shutdown the Pod XT Live ASIO driver when not using it. So, I close Cubase, select the POD XT as the recording device and restart Cubase. Of course, I forgot to activate the ASIO driver for Cubase. So I quit Cubase, reinitialise the ASIO driver and restart Cubase. I can’t send MIDI to the POD as there’s a lot of latency on it. So I tried to send the POD to the PC. No luck. After a while, I decided to disconnect the USB cable and go straight from my POD’s output to the internal sound card. I, of course, forgot to shut down Cubase so my entire PC freezes. Cue reboot of the PC.

Upon restarting Cubase, I found that the output was WAY TOO LOUD! I turned the line-level knob on the POD and found I only had a left channel on my earphones. The convertor to go from jack to mini-jack is a stereo convertor and, of course, I’m using a mono-out on my POD since I only have one instrument cable at home – the rest is in the studio. Also, the volume had to be ridiculously low so I either had the choice of not hearing anything and not blowing up my internal soundcard or hearing what I play while living with the crackling. So, that was no option either.

I ended up listening to the midi file through headphones while carefully trying to hear the sound of my electric guitar being used as an acoustic. Somewhere in between, I fiddled some more and had to reboot my PC two more times because I plugged/unplugged the USB cable that leads to the POD. It took me 1.5 hours and I ended up with nothing except a dry mouth from the dust and a considerably cleaner carpet.

So, I decided to finally go scouting for that USB mixing device I had been wanting to buy for quite a while. I saw a number of them while in France (Lexicon Lambda, Tascam US 122, an EDIROL which I’m not sure of and and M-Audio box). The box I wanted should have

• Midi in and out so I can cut back on the dust-eating;
• Separate left-right jack in, preferably switchable between line-, mic and -10 DB level
• XLR in for microphone or balanced output from another device
• Separate left and right jack out to drive active monitors or an external amp
• Headphone out so I won’t bug my wife or the neighbours at 3 am
• As little latency as possible

After looking at the Lexicon Lambda which is ridiculously overpriced in the Netherlands, checking the M-Audio boxes which did not have all the features I wanted and a number of other boxes which all mentioned “low latency”. There were even a few boxes which advertised that they had “high latency”.

I ended up with the Tascam US144 as the only thing on my shortlist. It advertises “0 latency recording” and the possibility to record 2 channels at 96 Khz which is more than the other in its price-range could say. It should also come with Cubase LE (which I don’t really need but it’s a nice plus). Additionally, the price I got was very good and I should receive it next week. Looking forward to hassle-free plug-and-play recording.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 08:27:00 and is filed under Gearhead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.