TC Electronic Konnekt 24D

I won this unit in an employee contest at Guitar Center. The first one broke. Called the National Sales Manager with the phone number on the congratulations letter. He sent another unit. Guess what? It's also broke.

External, bus powered audio interface. The Smaller footprint is nice, but it's a tad bit on the heavy side. Aims to be a portable unit and even comes with a bag, but no protection to keep the knobs from shearing off. Clearly not built for the road, that's probably why they later debuted a rugged unit more suitable for travel.

Both units worked great at first, sounded pretty decent out of the box. Then slowly, the first unit began to get scratchy on the output knob, and eventually lost output altogether on one side. The replacement unit had the same problems and added a broken headphone jack and is now rendered useless by a bizarre internal clock issue.

External bus powered box.

Two Firewire A ports for daisy chaining multiple units together (why? each unit costs $400-$500. Just buy an interface that has more inputs. It will cost far less in the long run.)

Jacks are all plastic/nylon, and are not fastened to the surface like a quality unit would have. Totally unacceptable for a unit in this price point. I don't care how many inputs/outputs it can handle...

Two XLR/.25" combo jacks on the front, four more .25" jacks on the back, four .25" for outputs, S/PDIF in/out, MIDI in/out and optical Lightpipe in and out. Two headphone jacks on the front. When you engage the two line inputs on the rear, you disengage the two front inputs. Lovely (rolls eyes).

Pre's are on par with anything else in this price range (don't know about the 'quiet' part mentioned by another reviewer, but I can certainly believe it...).

Since there are four analog outputs, you won't be doing surround mixes until you step up to the digital outs, and you'd still need a D/A before you can get signal to each speaker. Again, if you are doing surround mixes, you've probably already bought a better unit.

However, the four analog outs work nicely if you're going to be DJing with this unit. However, just don't expect the knobs to survive long if you're going to use it on gigs.

Bus powered unit. If you're using it with a laptop, expect to have to carry around the included power supply (which doesn't fit in the supplied bag) as a 4-pin 1394 jack won't supply power.

Phantom power switch located on the front (channels 1 and 2 only). Didn't check to see if it was true 48v or not, but it powers all my recording mics fine, so no complaints here.

Goes all the way to 24/192k sample rate if needed. If you only had $500 to spend on an interface, it's unlikely that you could afford the room treatment, microphones, or CPU power necessary to take advantage of that high quality rate. If you do have all of that stuff, you can probably afford a better interface and would be wise purchase one of those.

I was able to get the latency below 10ms without any major problems on an older system. That's about where you want to be before you consider any major tracking. Of course, the lower the better.

Direct monitoring available and the independent volume control for the headphones is handy.

Comes with Cubase LE. The integrated compressor and reverb seem snazzy at first. They sound pretty good and are certainly usable. But when you go to edit them, you don't get to work each control individually. Instead, you get some bonehead "MINT" system of triangles, squares, and dots that do god knows what if you're only trying to adjust the compression settings on the midband. Or the decay time. Or anything remotely familiar.

It can operate standalone, which is fine if you're in some kind of pinch where you need to mix two to four sources together (no independent control of channels 3 and 4 - they are ganged together). Outside of a piano or acoustic guitar lounge act, I can't figure out where this might come in handy over a small format mixer for about $100. Trust me, no one is going to come up to you to tell you how good your pre-amps do/don't sound in that kind of environment. Unless you get a gig in an anechoic chamber.

This thing looks great on paper, and will survive a quick showroom demo. But it's just not built for the long haul, and seems to be constructed to work long enough to get you outside of the warranty period.

Couple that with the fact that several people have had the same problems with this unit. Check out the forums on their own pages if you want to verify that. These kinds of problems just aren't typical of units in this price point, especially considering that this has quite a bit LESS than a unit costing, say, $100 more. Get Motu or Presonus instead. I've seen Motu's dropped clean on their face dislodging knobs and turn around and work for several years afterwards. Apparently, sitting on a computer workstation desk is too much abuse for this thing.

After having two of these units fail, it's enough to make me distrust any TC Electronic product. Other reviews here seem to reflect this thinking. Hopefully they will take these to heart and start building better products and taking care of their customers a little better.

Sleek and snazzy looking interface. I fell for the Apple-ish design. I'm a total sucker.

I think the onboard reverb and channel strip algorithms sound quite good, but that stuff is kind of pointless in this world of fast software processing (and who actually uses these boxes stand-alone?). I'd rather them spend their $ on better components, but I suppose just putting some of their existing algorithms on a cheap DSP was, well, cheap! (Audio DSPs are like $10 a pop in bulk).

The preamps are rather quiet with my fairly high-gain amp sims. Good enough for government work, as they say.

Hey Harmony Central, what's with all the feature oriented leading questions? People can look all that stuff up. They come here for some sort of insight into the product.

Bus powered but apparently my MacBook Pro doesn't deliver enough power. Oh well.

The Mac drivers / control panel were total crap for the first year. What a joke. I write software for a living and I would be ashamed to have released such garbage. They did get better though. But the control panel still crashes sometimes when you unplug the box. The control panel looks slick though!

The input connection for channel one is intermittent, so channel one is basically not usable. Oh well. I called TC and having the unit fixed would cost more than buying a used one that works fully. That's when you know something is junk (and yes most stuff is junk). By the way their support bureaucracy is retarded. I couldn't just directly contact the US repair shop. Had to go through their web interface and wait around. That's another clue that a company sells junk. If you've ever dealt with Mesa/Boogie's technical support you'll end up with high standards like me.

Bought this thing primarily because I had liked TC stuff in the past (had a G-Major). That was dumb. I think it has a good selection of features though. Now that the drivers are better its a decent interface. Looses points for the low quality knobs and no bus power w/my macbook pro.

External audio interface with integrated DSP FX. Sturdy alloy case, plastic front not so good some movement when changing setting with controls. Physical trims volume etc. can be handled by software! Near useless LED input/overload indicators best viewed with software.

Firewire, can connect up to 4 units for extra I/O. It is what it is and works.

14/14 I/O: 2 mic/inst/line, 2 line inputs and 4 line outputs, 8 ADAT and 2 S/PDIF (optical and coaxial) inputs and outputs, most of which I don't use. I'm no expert but the preamps seem good, mic inputs good, very nice inputs for guitar. Two Headphone sockets.

Bus and AC powered. Bus power and connectivity/stability on my iMac is poor. Needs restarts and coaxing to get it stable. The new drivers helped but still not great.

24-bit/192kHz new drivers much better that previous version but still as I said previously not great. Direct monitoring with effects (works) and also between networked units (not tried).

Built-in real-time DSP effects; Fabrik R reverb and Fabrik C channel strip you have a choice to use them from the unit itself or as plug-ins on your recording software. Ok when using from unit on your inputs and they do sound good. A complete waste of time as plug-ins.
Cubase LE recording software included (don't use it), Assimilator Konnekt plug-in for Konnekt 24D available for free download (have not used it due to previous being crap). Has a tuner which is ok. Stand alone mixer and use of effects.

This is the only external audio interface I've had. I've used PCI before and although not perfect, better than this. I have no complaints about the sound and had no drop out problems. As with one other review I have had problems with the output level pot. It bled between channels and was pretty useless. I sent it back to the shop and so far it's taken 6 weeks for TC Electronics to fix. They said they had to go back to a previous manufacturer because the have since changed parts. I would not buy one again, I would not recommend this product to anyone else. I have had no problems from the shop I purchased from, I have had very good service from them.

Is is a desktop and kind of portable unit and has many practical features for a homerecording studio (there is a mobile version available as whell)
The case seems stable (metall) and whell designed..

pls see tc Portal for precise specs.

FireWire
you can combine them

there are plenty of audio and digital connections - pls see tc Portal for precise specs.

Preamp Quality is excellent
Headphone Amp is great

Bus-powered?
AC-powered? If AC-powered, adapter or line cord

Phantom power for 2 mics -+48V

Sample rates/bit resolutions supported? many see specs
Types of drivers supported? proprietary only
Direct monitoring - yes done whell

there is a configuration and mixing sw coming along - whell done

the dsp effects, are great but i am note very pleased about the reliabilty in combination with my Cubase studio 4.1 unde MSW XP SP2

Not sure, hom much the TC Devicedrivers or CS4.1 or maybe even XP are causing the problems. (so make sure to test the device in your configuratio as what you want it to be used later)

Also there was a problem with one of the potentiometers. The Device had to be sent to denmar (i am located in switzerland, so that might be different for other areas) and it is gone now for 3 weeks. I must admit i am speculating- but it smells like tc has a problem with there potentiometeres built in the Konnekt 24d

I have been playing guitar since 1964. Got my first reel to reel recorder in '69. Been involved with recording audio to windows since '92. I got this device because of the reputation of TC Electronic, the Dice II chipset, and the positive comments from Craig Anderton on the Pro review thread here at HC

I am using an HP Pavilion desktop with a pci 1394 adapter with the TI chipset, together with Ableton Live v6

The mixer interface is like an anlog image of a mixer. They use tabs and have a setup page and a configuration page and a tuner page. I do not like their interface. It is not intuitive. I don't like it.

I suppose the proof of the pudding is the sound. It is very natural, and uncolored. I have not stressed it, as I am just learning how to get around with it. I had a problem for many months of pops, click, and drop outs at any buffer setting, and support was unable to do anything to help me out. Their support is the worst I have seen. I totally sucks! I finally figured out that the drop outs were caused by my Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard, but man I hated to have to swap them out. There have been many unhappy users over this whole drop out problem. I think they rushed to market too soon to make the Christmas season.

It's a good price point for the sound quality. But I totally hate TC Electronic now. They released a beta version of the product, their support sucks, I have had it for six months and they still are rewriting their drivers, supposedly. The whole thing has been so frustrating that I could never buy a TC Electronic product again. There is too much competition and nothing is worth the headache and heartache this thing has caused. I wouldhave gone with a pci interface, or got a Traveller or an RME 400 if I had any idea of the problems I would have to deal with. Yes, it does sound good. I give them credit for that. But I have had to put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it before I could be able to make that claim. Maybe it will work for you maybe it won't. Maybe it will grow into something good.