Forget about the Tascam US-122

[stef]

Hello,

Well I bought this card and had to bring it back to the store.
I wasted so much time because of this that i decided to write a quick
review for potential buyers.
Ok it´s cheap and kind of cute, but beside everything´s disappointing.

Buffering size: can´t go lower than 512 which gives you a huge
latancy. If you try smaller you get a regular clic.
I use an ibook 500MHZ and i suspect the latancy to be smaller without
using the card (!)

I could only run about 20 audio tracks, and no virtual instrument on.
Without the card, using the standard Asio i can easely run 24 audio
tracks and a few EXS.

Last point: The pre-amp are a joke, i tried with several mics but they
were always way too low! If you want to record an acoustic guitare
you´ll probably have to add some pre-amps to get a decent level input.

I made those tests using Logic and Peak on Mac OS 9.2. Haven´t tried
with OSX and with Cubase though.

I changed it to a M-audio DUO. Happy with it so far. No direct
monitoring mixer unfortunately but it´s ok since the latancy is pretty
good (for being a usb card).

PS: M-audio will release a cheap Firewire card, Firewire 410, i don´t
know when. Check it out.

[Mike Rivers]

I just got one in here for a review. I'm not ready to forget about it
yet, but I was quite surprised that I could crash it pretty
consistently simply by turning the phantom power on when it's off. The
USB light goes out the only way to get it working again is to unplug
the USB cable and reconnect it. I thought it only happened when I had
an audio program running (but not playing), but it occasoinally loses
the USB connection when switching phantom power even if no audio
application is open. Maybe there's a difference between the two USB
ports on my laptop computer. I'll have to try it on the other one and
see if this annoyance goes away.

For most people it probably won't be a big deal, but if you have
several mics and switch between condensers and dynamics frequenly when
tracking different sources, it could be a pain.

I've made some casual measurements of gain vs. record level, but will
put real numbers in my actual review (in Recording Magazine). I don't
think that the preamps are a joke, but they seem to require about
-40 dBu to reach full scale when set to maximum gain, and that's a
pretty good shout at 6 inches into a Beyer M260. I'll bet they're just
fine with a modern "hot" condenser mic, though. We'll see.

At this point my computer is totally untweaked for audio with the
exception of enabling DMA on the hard disk and turning off the virus
scanner (though I reallized I hadn't turned off Zone Alarm even though
I wasn't on-line) and I found that even the 4-track demo song
occasionally hiccups when playing. I'm sure it should do better than
that with a little care. My primary application for it, should I
decide to keep it, will be for 2-track recording so loads of tracks
isn't a big deal for me, but I'm sure it will be for the readers.

But since we brought it up, how much is this a function of the
interface, and how much is it a function of other stuff that people
smarter than I should be able to get over?




--
I'm really Mike Rivers - )