TC Electronic Studio Konnekt 48

Rackable unit, the front VU meters are not of much use for the line inputs as they cannot be seen in mono.

Onboard fabrik effects are very nice, and could be run in plugin mode, if they did not use so much CPU when running in said plugin mode.

Physical preamp controls are total junk, they broke down after a few months use. after repair, one of them they broke down again, and was not even repaired by the service center.

Firewire works rather fine, even on non-Ti chipsets.

Preamps are useless, spending more time broken than working.

You could plug guitars & basses in it, if they worked.

MIDI works fine, no MIDI notes dropped.
Send/return options can be configured onboard through a painful interface or via VST plugins that only work in stereo, with standard pairs, and when using the same input/ouput chanels.

one dedicated headphone out, the second one is only a repeat of outputs 11/12.

AC powered with a line cord.
+48V phantom is noce, but only one switch for all 4 preamps. Preamps don't work anyways so ti is not really worth bothering.

Specs are fine, TC just needs official 64 bit drivers.

Mixer applet does the job.

Unit can work in stand alone, which is very useful.

Servicing at TC is not an option you want to use. If your unit goes faulty, get back to the shop and ask for your money back.

Even when stating that they will replace any unit in minimal time, units are not replaced, repair delays are humongous, and the unit is not even always repaired when being serviced: in my case, it took 4 weeks to repair, before breaking down again. It then took 6 weeks NOT to be repaired. The issue has been raised to TC electronic who actually dismissed it & closed the support request.

Basically the unit is nice, and has good D/A & A/D converters, but I wouldn't recommend it, except as an additional unit you can leave over 10% of the time at the repair shop.

Rackmount with LED's for I/O metering. There's awesome onboard DSP with the proprietary TC Reverb and Dynamics.

Firewire, works best with a TI chipset

The 4 preamps on the front are surprisingly good. Digital I/O and midi on the back. Also 8 analog ins/outs on the back in addition to the 4 pres. There are dedicated cue/mon outs on the back and 2 headphone outs, each with volume control. Surround capable.

Ac powered with true 48V for phantom

24 bit/192khz sample rates with direct monitoring for near-zero latency. The big killer for this unit has been drivers. See the above review, that guy's review reflects a lot of what I'd read about the TC drivers for the Konnekt series. The reason I'm writing this review is that as of now, May2009 the newest drivers are solid and work fine. Given that, this is an excellent unit.

The TC Near mixer applet is fully functional and allows full control and unlimited routing. This can be used stand-alone.

This has performed for me wonderfully and I would recommend it. If lost/stolen I would replace. It would be nice if it had SMPTE/Midi timecode.

RACKMOUNT STUDIO RECORDING QUALITY.
VU METERS 4 DEDICATED + 4 SHARED WITH 8 INPUTS.
ONBOARD DSP
FULL CONTROLS
METAL CASE
IN A DECENT CASE IT WOULD BE WELL SUITED TO THE ROAD.

IT'S A FIRE WIRE INTERFRACE.

Hardware wise it's an absolute beauty and will give you many inputs and outputs. It even features not only a main stereo out (this is XLR jacks only), but also a full set of TRS surround sound outputs.

There's even MIDI in and out built in.

Firewire only.

This seems to be it's ultimate downfall. Dreadful driver and because of it plagued with latency problems that defy belief for a product of this price range.

You basically get 4 channels with active 48V pre-amps for microphones, these can also be turned off and used as standard inputs. These 4 inputs have there own booster and volume control on the front of the device making them very handy(if the device worked properly).

Then there's 2 headphone connections each with it's own volume control (perfect for home studio's).

A nice multi VU display with 8 seperate VU's (4 are for the mic inputs mentioned, the other are shared with the remaining 8 inputs).

On the rear, you get inputs and outputs for the remaining 8 channels as well as MIDI in and out, Optical in and out, 2 firewire ports(if even one of them worked properly I'd settle just for one), WCK in and out and even a remote control to take command of it all without haveing to be right next to the unit(perfect for recording without assistance).

AC mains powered, accepts voltages for practically any country on Earth.

Supplies 48V phantom power to the microphone inputs if switched on.

For full details see the TC Electronic website, due to my next comments you'll understand why I'm not going to rave about it here. This review is more about why you shouldn't buy one of these overpriced units.

The main factor will be that it's capable of recording at 24bit 192KHz sampling rates. (Although even TC Electronic themselves admit it's a waste of time and 96KHz is all you should ever need anyway).

The drivers is where it's just appalling. For a product of this price range it's simply unforgivable that a decent driver has not been developed and I'm left firmly believing that TC Electronic should either start hiring some good engineers or drop out of the computer recording market altogether and stick to stand alone units as these are surely going to wreck there good name.

Yes, it has direct monitoring, if and when it works.

You get there appalling driver and Cubase. Done.

A software app that would be really nice if it actually worked properly and if you didn't get hangs and reboots when trying to use your applications(even the supplied one).

Have not even looked into stand alone operation. The computer recording capabilities(why else do you buy a computer recording device) are practically non-existant.

Overall I would not recommend this unit to my worst enemy. It's simply terrible.

I did everything that TC support said to do and more, even went out and bought an entire new motherboard and seperate fire wire card and still a pile of junk, that's the most expensive paper weight I've ever owned.

All I can say is DON'T BUY ONE fellow musicians. Those saying there great apparently use XP SP2 and under and alas I can't even buy that. Even then the reports of drop outs and stupid latency issues which shouldn't exist plague many users. Don't take my word for it, go take a look at the forums.

If I'd known about these before I purchased this unit I would never have touched it. Now I sit crossing my fingers that the support team will actually get back to me(it's now been over a month and there support seems to have stopped), or a driver so I might actually be able to make this gear return on it's investment.

Before this I had an M-Audio Delta 44 and it was superb. The drivers were not perfect for that when I bought it but M-Audio updated it and continue to update it and after the first update it's never let me down.

This device so far bombs all the way. If I could purchase XP SP2 I would just to get this going because if it worked it would be amazing. The sound quality is excellent(when it's not breaking up from the latency issues, this is without any applications other than the OS and a player running in the back ground).

If you really want to experience this torture then might I just save you a lot of grief and suggest you setup the unit with it's flashy program the way you want, then exit that program before running your recording software or it will probably sit with the blue firewire light on doing nothing at all. Oh and as for the remote control forget it. Without a decent driver, that caused the unit to have more latency than it's flashy setting panel.

Seriously bad and to be honest, if TC Electronic don't come out with a much needed update soon, I'm going to sell it off(probably loosing cash in the process) and get the next M-Audio device for my extra inputs.

I was considering a TC Electronic G System, but now there's simply no way, unless this devastation of a device is made usable. Also for the record, who gives a @#$% if you can drive a tank over the G System, that's the last thing on Earth that device should be used for. Another thing that's making me believe that TC Electronics is starting to loose it.

TC Electronic, if anyone of you guys reads this, I purchased your equipment due to your fine name. Right now I feel totally ripped off and am in utter bewilderment that you don't seem to give a rats.

Fellow musicians, you have been warned.