Customer Reviews

Tascam US-144 USB 2.0 Audio and MIDI Interface

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I absolutely love this product for portable recording. I have a Dell notebook computer and have used this to record solo piano and my music lessons. The microphone pre-amps are pretty decent. I have used the mic preamps directly and have compared them with the same mics used through Grace One preamps. Surprisingly decent in comparison. The recordings of piano compared to a setup with a MOTU 828 MKII and Grace One's was really pretty good. I absolutely loved the large controls for gain on the top of the unit. Very easy to manipulate and more solid than other competitive product cheap knobs. The fact that this unit is USB 2 means that the recording quality can be far superior than USB 1.1 units that are going to limit whether you can do high quality recordings on multiple channels. The midi interface works great also in Acid and Sonar. The unit definitely will cause your laptop battery to drain faster if you are using mic inputs with phantom power but that is fine by me for the great functionality. Line in works fine but if I had any minor complaint it would be that it would be nice to have an effects insert interface. Obviously, this should not be a problem for line-in devices but is more of an issue for mic recording where you might want some outboard vocal processing. The headphone interface is good and I like the ability to use a mix between the computer and the external source into the headphones.

The previous review is absolutely right. For the price, there's not match to this device. My only complaint is that the headphones volume doesn't get loud enough. Also, don't panic if you're having drivers problems such as device not working after you reboot your computer. Just update to the latest driver and don't forget to update the firmware also at www.tascam.com

I'm using it with Vista Premium on a desktop. I think the Vista drivers could be better, because I've had some compatability problems with programs like Cakewalk and Audacity, whereas these programs worked seamlessly before I got the Tascam. I would recommend it anyways simply because the majority of the time it does work with these programs and I get good recordings off of my guitar onto Audacity. It's basically a plug and play, but there is some adjustments that must be made to the sound card you're replacing.

The box itself is good quality metal, and is heavy enough that if I pull my guitar a little it doesn't come falling off my desk. The MIDI plugin is also just fine.

Hopefully they'll release better Vista drivers down the road, maybe when the first service pack is released? Till then, it's a good product anyways.

I picked up one of these at GC about a week ago and I love it. I was looking for a good ASIO audio interface to use with my laptop for performing software synths live on gigs and rehearsals.

I have a duo-core HP running @ 2.0Ghz with 4 G ram and a 7200 rpm drive running XP pro.

I can run synths at the "low" latency setting which is about 5-7 ms and can record audio (without playing synths) on the "lowest latency" setting with 1 ms delay! I can actually have SONAR fold back a reverb plugin to the performer with no noticable lag!

Here's my Pros & Cons...

PROS: Small (about the size of an external hard drive), USB powered, 48v Phantom Power, recessed ports, clean A/D signal and tone, low latency, no knobs to break off or loose, (flat rubber knobs built into casing), 1/4" phone jack, (I am so tired of those crappy little 1/8" jacks. I have some AKG 240 headphones and hate using a stepdown adapter!)

CONS: Only analoge out is L/R RCA & phones, (L/R balanced 1/4" would have been nice), outputs easily create a ground loop if you run them into a PA without using a ground lift DI box then taking the XLR to the board.

One odd propblem on my desktop is that I can't get my Creative Audigy ASIO drivers to let the Tascam take control in SONAR, but that's just a combination of that audio card and software, (I bet if I disabled the Audigy in the Hardware settings it would work, but the Audigy ASIO is fast enough for what I do with it).

I am very happy with this unit so far. I simply put in in my notebook bag with a USB cable, grab my 10 pound Yamaha KX61 controller, and I'm off to rehearsal without a ton of heavy gear.

This is my second Tascam product I've own, (the other is a FW1804 18 channel firewire audio interface I use for multi track remote recording), and I am very happy with them both.

This product is horridly difficult to get working on OS X (Mac) products. The customer service is close to worthless. I am at the point of giving up and purchasing a competitor's product that actually works. My guess is that either Tascam is incompetent wrt software, or more likely the product is new enough that they haven't gotten it to work yet on all common OS's. (I would have given it zero stars, but it appears that one star is the minimum allowed).

Just plain works with no problems. I use it as a recording "card" to transfer DAT live recordings to my computer to edit and retransfer to dat and CD. I have owned two different internal recording cards neither of which was as inexpensive or as reliable.

As the other reviews say this is a great product for the price and ever since I updated the Firmware and Driver it has worked perfectly with Vista Ultimate. I have also used this product successfully with Adobe Audition 3.0 as well as the included Cubase LE software. In both cases the product performed very well and I have had no problems with it. I do have one issue with this product however (In vista the option to change the devices Sample Rate is missing in the control panel, however it does show up in the audio settings for playback and recording devices in Vista's audio Control Panel) I have never been able to set the device to Stereo 96Khz only Mono? I'm not sure why and it does not effect me since I always record at 44100Khz from my condenser Microphones. This could just be an issue with the build of Vista that I am using since I am using the Service Pack one Refresh Build!!! Also setting the unit to 96Khz Mono may mean that both Mono Microphone Inputs are set to 96Khz! Anyhow this products recording quality is great and it is perfect for what I use it for.

I am a Music Education Major and I generally use the US-144 to record my Universities Brass ensembles for competitions as well as to hear the balance, blend and phrasing of the groups so that we can address problems before we make the final recordings for Competitions. This thing saves you a lot of money because you don't have to go to a studio to create a great Live sounding recording.

I recommend this product to anyone who is looking to do simple high quality Home or Mobile Recording it is truly worth every penny!!!

Product was sold without power cord, and installment disk. Ship in box to small with nothing to cushion equipment. Seller did not care.

As far as home studio recording, this little device is really nice: 24 bit stereo audio with MIDI, and USB 2.0 speed. The phantom power works great on condenser mics, and runs off CPU/USB power. Tascam has made great products all the way back to my 4-track cassette dubbing days, and this device is great in all those same ways.

The problem comes with drivers. I've verified that the stock (v2.0) drivers work fine in Snow Leopard on the Mac, they DO NOT work on Win7 64-bit. They only claim to offer 64-bit Vista drivers (and 32-bit Win7), however if you look around the web you'll find that nobody running a 64-bit windows Vista/7 setup can get the driver to work. Sound comes through, but it's noisy and attenuated. This is a real shame, as I just built a Win7/64bit box that would be much better for digital music than my MacBook. From what I can tell, XP drivers are rock solid.

Anyway, something you should know. Otherwise, this is a great way to start recording/podcasting.

My son has been using Sony ACID Home Studio 7 for months, mainly playing around with the built in loops to create his own music. He also plays a little bass guitar, and wanted to create some of his own tracks to integrate with the loops that he downloads. So, I went off on a quest for a USB interface, as our built-in soundcard on our desktop is very low-end.

Let me say, I'm a very technical guy, but I found the search for the right USB interface to be a little challenging. I had read that one needed to be careful about software and hardware compatibility issues. That is indeed a true statement.

I purchased the USB-144 locally, after returning a different product that had just too many little challenges. I spent half the day yesterday toying with the US-144, making sure that I understood it before turning a less-technical kid loose on it. I immediately downloaded the latest drivers and firware from TASCAM's website to install on my laptop, and finally managed to get it all working late New Year's eve. My major stumbling block was not knowing how to drive the included CuBase LE software.

Today, I installed it on my kid's system, but installed an earlier version of the drivers. Reading the release notes, I was dismayed to discover that my kid's system had an incompatible USB chipset (!!! - there's that hardware compatibility issue!# Tried using it anyways, but the sound was crackly throughout. So, once again to [...], downloaded the latest driver #2.0#, without much hope. Loe and behold, the latest drivers do seem to have overcome the compatibility issue with nVidia USB chipsets. Mic'ed vocals sounded fine, and when I plugged in his bass guitar it sounded great!!

Sony ACID was much easier to configure properly to work with this device. Just select it as your input device, create a new track, and select which input to record from. CuBase is much more powerful software, I'm sure - but with that power comes a steeper learning curve. I'll probably use it on my laptop, but for now I think I'll let my kid keep using the software that he already understands.

So, make sure you have the latest drivers and firmware, and prepare to spend some time learning how to set up your inputs and outputs #more complicated than I anticipated).

No matter which device you purchase, make sure that it supports the hardware and operating system that you're running. Go to the manufacturer's website and read the release notes, look for hardware compatibility lists, and search the net for reviews and message boards. Bottom line is that many if not all of these audio interfaces have compatibility issues with certain types of hardware, and a little research ahead of time can save a lot of frustration.

One last thing: I set the US-144 as the default playback and record device under Control Panel, Sounds. It has a much richer sound than the built-in motherboard soundcard, so I'm planning to leave it attached and in use as the sound device on a permanent basis.