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Today's Bonus:
- Maintain monitor control with the high resolution meter, large volume knob and the feature dedicated knobs
- Features IMPACT(TM) Mic preamp and I/O to give you extraordinary recording quality with all you need to get the job done
- Also includes the M40 Studio Reverb: a simple to use, great sounding reverb powered by AlgoFlex(TM).
- Bundled with Cubase LE4 to instantly record instruments and vocals into your Mac or PC
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I had to get rid an Alesis iO device after the upgrading to Windows 7 and downgraded to an older, but compatible, Tascam USB interface device in the meantime. The Konnekt6 is better than both of them. The device buttons and knobs all have a quality feeling to them plus they're functionally elegant with indicator illumination. The monitor volume knob, for instance, glows brighter as it is turned. The balanced output works great as do the inputs. The WDM drivers work great in Windows 7 32 bit, as does the control panel. When running it for the first time, it recognized that there was a new firmware on the disk and seamlessly installed it. The control panel's interface seems well designed I was able to grasp all of the mixer and device setting configuration without resorting to documentation. I probably will never use the reverb but it was easy to completely disable. So far, I'm very pleased with this purchase.
Buy TC Electronic Desktop Konnekt 6 24Bit/192kHz Firewire Desktop Audio Interface Now
If you only need 1-2 inputs then this is the interface to have in my opinion. Most of the people who complain about having issues with firewire interfaces on Windows are using the awful VIA firewire chipset. Both my laptop and desktop have the VIA chipset built in, and both of them had numerous issues with this interface and the focusrite pro 24 which I have also used. After upgrading to TI based firewire cards this interface works much better (lower cpu usage, no clipping, no driver related crashes, etc).
I was torn between this interface and the focusrite pro 24, ultimately I decided to go with this one because I wanted the easy access to the preamp gains and the larger, higher resolution VUmeter (also I use the NI Kore2 controller, and it looks like this unit was specifically designed to match that one, they look great sitting side by side).
The quality of the preamps on this unit is very high, and I can't stress enough how useful it is to have the preamp gains right in front of you when recording guitar/bass, it has really made a huge difference in my sound compared with my old interface where I couldn't easily adjust the gain so I rarely changed it.
The built in headphone amp is very high quality also, I have a headroom bithead headphone amp and I would say that this one is at least as good if not better, it does an excellent job of driving all my headphones. I have a set of Beyer DT990 cans which are notorious for sounding horrible without good amplification, my old MAudio interface could not drive them properly but they sound great on this one.
I don't use the built in reverb but it seems to be pretty good. No problem with the drivers or control panel on Win7 x64.. the only time I have had any problems was when using the VIA firewire chipset.
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I use this with powered speakers solely for music listening. I rip CDs in Lossless, and play the files back with the Konnekt 6 and Mackie 824MK2s, and the sound is just unbelievable. I use it at 192 kHz and it's unreal how good it sounds for playback I've had high end audio gear like Krell and Wilson stuff, and this rig rivals that stuff at a tiny fraction of the price. The TC Near control software that is included is very easy to use. A superb sounding and looking product at a great price.
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I picked this interface up solely for mixing. Given the entry-level price, I didn't have very high expectations. I have been using a Focusrite Liquid Saphire 56 to drive my monitors, and I wasn't unhappy with it, but it's in a mobile rack and when I do location-recording I am not always motivated to re-cable everything.
Before I start, I'll add a few disclaimers. Everyone's ears are different, and this is my *opinion* about the sound quality--it's a subjective assessment. Chances are unless you have a treated room, clean power, good monitors, etc, it will be hard to tell a significant difference between almost any of the prosumer-grade audio interfaces. Lastly, I don't really care about the direct inject or pre-amp sound quality or AD conversion, for me this is only being used as a DAC/volume knob.
Good:
Very clean DAC: low noise, fast transients, crisp high frequency response.
Bus powered, (with option for wall wart, but, using bus power greatly lowers the noise floor.)
Physical button to switch to mono.
High gain, extremely low-noise headphone amp.
Bad:
very easy to overrun the hardware safety buffer (causes audio playback to stop) when playing high sample-rate 96khz+ audio (running with a larger buffer is fine for me since I don't need low-latency recording monitoring.)
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In comparison to my Focusrite interface I noticed the following. (For the most part, all of these differences are because of the analog circuitry after the DAC chip. There really isn't a lot of difference in the abilities of the DAC converters in low to mid grade recording gear on the market.)
The amps on the Konnekt are quieter, significantly so at 6khz and higher. With the LS56 I had to boost EQ to know if the the hiss I heard was ambient amp noise, or actually printed on the track, this alone was worth buying this interface, regardless of the convenience factor.)
Even at the lowest volume setting for the mains aren't hearing any noise. This may actually be somewhat deceiving because I suspect there is some gating going on on the output circuit.
Mid frequency transients (meaning 400-2000 hz) are faster than the LS56--more definition and bite (great for finding what's making a mix boxy sounding.) This is advantageous for mixing because it exposes problems, but actually takes some of the life out of listening, so I guess this could be considered a negative for the audiophile crowd.
All that said, I won't be giving up my LS56 anytime soon. The versatility of that system for tracking is hard to beat, but I won't review the focusrite here ...
This is a very nice interface, and it definitely compares in sound quality to more expensive systems.
This product is great! I am using it on a Dell m6500 laptop. I previously was using the sound card of a Hercules DJ Console RMX but found I had serious ground loop problems with the Hercules (yes I know it says the outputs are balanced and I am using balanced TRS cables but still massive ground looping problems.). After I plugged my monitors into this device I was in heaven! No ground looping, and clarity I have not heard in my monitors ever! I am using Ableton Live 8 with this device and in ableton you have the Test section where you can emulate CPU usage at a given latency and see if you get any audio artifacts. I generally run this with the ASIO drivers set at 384 samples (11.4ms latency) but I was able to switch to the power profile of "Low Latency" and drop it down to 64 samples (4.1ms latency) and not have any artifacts until about 70% CPU usage which is phenomenal given my previous experiences.
Also for those of you wondering, I am able to run Ableton with the TC Electronic ASIO drivers and and WDM TC Electronic drives simultaneously. That is to say, I can watch a video on youtube while playing a session in ableton at the same time. I only say this because I was not able to do this with the Hercules or the ASIO4ALL drivers I used previously and sometimes I just want to reference a sound I am trying to mimic or want a break from what I am producing to clear the ears and I don't fancy shutting down ableton every time I wish to do so. Plus if I am waiting on an important email or message its nice to have my windows sounds come through if needed. Below is my setup for reference
Win7Pro 64 bit
8GB RAM DDR3 1333MHz CL7 (Kingston HyperX)
2 Momentus XT 500GB RAID-0
Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (It is 6 pin so it powers the unit as well, its hella nice that they ship it with an AC adapter anyway)
Akai MPK88
Akai APC40
Vestax VCM 600
Ableton Live Suite 8
Yamaha HS50M Reference Monitors
The driver software is top notch as well, seems very stable thus far and the dim feature is great (essentially you mute the monitors without having to turn the volume knob to 0) and you can still listen out of your phones if you need (there is a dedicated knob for phone volume too, but you can disable it so the volume of both the headphones and the monitors is controlled by the big knob).
As a final note I recommend you download a DPC spike checker tool and see if you will have any drop out issues like other people here have. The biggest issue facing most people is the 1394 (firewire) controller is actually shared with other devices and with the DPC spike checker tool you can actually disable devices while it checks to see if it is worth purchasing firewire equipment (maybe you just need to disable a card reader to drop the latency down sufficiently and that is worth it to you or maybe you need to disable wifi, card reader, pcmcia and esata and that isn't).
