Any thoughts on the A/D-D/A in Tascams FW stuff?

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Somewhere along the path of agonizing over the Metric Halo vs. Fireface decision, Tascam's new Firewire interfaces caught my attention. Specifically the 1884 and 1804. These both seem like pretty well-spec'd devices (for whatever that is worth), but there has been very little discussion of sonic quality, as far as I've been able to find.

Has anybody put these through their paces, and want to provide an opinion?

Thanks.

[fifthcircle]

I've written here pretty extensively on the FW-1884... The quick summary-

It is one of the worst engineered pieces of $h!t I've every used... As a controller, it is ok, but the analog front end is easy to blow out by doing something as simple as plugging in a microphone (condenser or dynamic) when the phantom is on. Doing that can destroy 4 channels pretty easily. The firewire implementation is also not up to spec so if you need 10' or more of cable, you'll need a firewire repeater.


-Ben

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Heh, you certainly did want to provide an opinion :D

Thanks for the info. Is the problem you mentioned an isolated problem with phantom power on the preamps, or indicative of the quality of the unit as a whole? I'll be doing solely line-level synth recording, so if the problem were to be with phantom power alone, but the rest of unit really shone, I might be able to work around it...

Well, unless I hear something radically different from someone, I guess I'll look elsewhere than the Tascams...

Cheers

[fifthcircle]

My experience is as follows- we installed 3 of them in a studio. In the end before we ditched it, we had 4 of them get blown out and replaced by Tascam. Tascam, even after all of this, still refused to admit that there may be a design problem.

The other problems- (all were on a PC), if it sat for too long, it would often loose communication with the host computer. Then you boot your DAW or try to use it and you have major problems because you no longer have a sound interface. With the midi out we used it to feed time code and we would often have dropouts, as I said before, their firewire interface craps out with anything longer than 3m of cable (roughly 10 feet). A geffen active repeater solved this problem, though.

Going in line we didn't have the blowout problem and the digital I/O seemed fine. There were just so many other issues that I wouldn't wish it on anybody...

Now, in fairness, I've also talked with people that didn't have these problems... We just so happened to have so many that my opinion is rather strong on it...

--Ben