RUINEDNATION

Recently I’ve been looking to add a Firewire audio interface to my studio, so that I can make the transition to Mac at some point and also because I would like an interface with built-in preamps. Historically I have always gone with M-Audio but after a little digging around it seems to me that after they were acquired by Avid the quality of a lot of their products have been less than stellar. That’s when I came across T.C. Electronic’s Konnect 8 (the smaller brother of their Konnect 24D interface) and read a lot of good things about it. SoundOnSound gave a pretty decent review and there were many forum postings along the same lines. So while I was looking at both the M-Audio Firewire 410 and the Konnect 8 (both priced the same) at my local music shop , the staff member I was talking to quickly pointed to the Konnect 8 and said the preamps were unbelievable and I would not reget it.

Sadly, I have since regretted it. As great as the preamps are in the Konnect 8 I found their drivers to be poor and the mixer control panel to be seriously lacking any sense of usefulness. It’s a firewire box with 2 firewire ports – you can chain up 4 devices. TIP: make sure that you use a Firewire card with a chipset from Texas Instruments. Other chipsets cause issues of reliability. Two Multi-format jacks in the front for plugging in mics or instruments it also has two switches to chose between the two switches to select between the front jack and the back 1/4″ jacks. Unfortunately you can’t record/monitor with the front and back jacks at the same time (very weak). To make up for this deficiency they put in an aux input but for monitoring only. Output is two 1/4 jacks (so no Surround Sound mixing unless you use the digital coax out jack). I found the Aux channel be helpful but nothing beyond that assessment. The front jacks were indeed very nice and preamps did an excellent job in picking up guitars and mics and it’ll also work without a firewire cable hooked up to it. Very helpful if you want to use it has a preamp for a show. Overall, physically found the Konnect 8 to be very good and has great potential for musicians who play live and record in studios.

The software and drivers, however, is the Achilles heel of this product. Installing it was simple enough with the CD that came with it and it informed me that an updated driver was available and it also updated the firmware to which is very helpful. I then downloaded that new drivers and it uninstalled and installed them with I thought was no issue, however upon looking at TC’s forum it turns that out that you should also manually search and delete the driver files before installing the new drivers (really - making an uninstaller is not that difficult).

So with that done, I fired up Sonar and loaded up song that uses some pretty heavy VST synths (Vanguard, Gladitor, Acoustik Piano, Stylus RMX) and also has couple of loops and midi track for my Alesis QSR, but my Delta 44 handled this without much issue and it’s almost 6 years old. With in the first 10 seconds static and sound slowed to a crawl, so I adjusted ASIO timing from 64 (which was what I used from the Delta) to 128. About a minute the same thing. Adjusted to 256 major sound problems solved but big pops and clicks abound and my dual-core cpu spiking. Re-adjusted to 512 spiking solved but still pops and clicks. So I switch to WDM/KS and tooling with the latency I was able to find a decent setting at 12 - 15 msec (there is a slight delay in midi but it okay for laying down track ideas). But I then noticed that while I was playing the and song making adjust to tracks every blob I clicked on would cause the song to skip, click or pop. I found that making adjustments will cause to DAW software to lockup and crash the computer and also depending on the app if you click ASIO Control Panel nothing happens. Also I noticed that on the available inputs and ouputs I could only choose TCNear 1, TCNear 2, TCNear Stereo what was missing was the digital input and output.

Upon having this many problems I decided that maybe it was time to start fresh so I back everything up and did a complete reinstall hopefully that will clear up these issues. It actually got worse. I installed the new drivers and started Sonar again and loaded the same song and make adjustments once again to the latency and I noticed something new….this time while the sound was fine I kept thinking that something was off and sure enough the course of 4 minute song everything went from starting in sync to ending with the midi tracks about 40 - 50 msecs behind and that was with a latency setting of 256 and 512. Also the TCNear Midi drivers were missing and so again the digital ins and outs. The solution for the missing midi was to install the driver and software, go to Windows Update, download and install the TC Electronic driver update from their site sans the control panel, re-install the driver and software. For the missing digital ports it actually took installing Amplitube to get these to show up, I can only assume that Amplitube’s ASIO control panel I guess either rewrote or made changed to the way the drivers were listed.

And finally there’s the Mixer/Control Panel software. The front page is basic and just has the available channels and next page is where all the routing is supposed to happen but every conceivable routing option did not work for me, and the last page is the system setup where you can change latency. I found their mixer to be completely worthless and pining to return to M-Audio’s control panel.

But regardless it really boils down to latency and I’ve found this device to be an extremely poor performer and very frustrating. The hardware itself is very nice I found the front panel to extremely useful for playing on the road. But I cannot recommend this product to anybody and it’s going to back today for a M-Audio 410. My two other cards are M-Audio and despite their cheap construction these days for me it’s all about the software. And while it’s a clunker it’s own right at least when I make a change to the input and output settings I can tell. Also it will allow me to turn my Delta 44 into a external effects processor mixer so I can take advantage of Sonar 7’s new external fx features which in which I can use the effects in the Ensoniq ASR-10 and Yamaha FX500 along with my array of VST Effects.

Maybe I’ll post about my experiences with M-Audio 410 in the next couple of weeks.