TC lent me the interface a few months ago, and no one could deny that, at that time, the drivers were anything but efficient. Just take a look at TC forums or others: instability, clicks and dropouts, TCNear and plugs being temperamental, etc. Then came the 2.0 version (and the 2.01 update) and everything changed, at least on the two Macs in the studio. I‘ve been working with this interface for almost two months, and I’ve tried several possible scenarios.

First, the SK48 has been perfectly stable, despite a G5 whose various ports (PCI, USB, FW) are really quite busy. Strangely enough, I only had issues when I tried to use a PCI FireWire card. So goodbye to the guilty card, and since I’ve got an unfailing system. I’ve been sending audio signals continuously on 11 channels for a few days and haven’t had any trouble. 11 channels only, because our review specimen is one of those having issues with their pot-meters, issues TC is aware of.

The sound quality is stunning, I constantly rediscover subtle details in tracks or pieces, even if I know them by heart. The SK48 / BM6A association works really nicely, which is hardly surprising, because there’s every possibility that TC R&D uses Dynaudio speakers. The new Impact II preamps have a comfortable dynamic range, offering 62 dB of gain (42 dB for instrument input), which should let you use any mics, guitars or basses, active or passive. They are quite neutral sounding, in the TC tradition, and give very good results in almost every scenario, acoustic instruments, voices, percussions, amp miking, etc.

Among all the recordings we’ve made for this review, here are two guitars, an electro-acoustic and an electric (thanks to Mathias Desmier). The first is a classical cutaway Takamine, miced with a Neumann TLM-103 pointing at the rosette, with some slight off-axis variations (that you can hear in the audio examples). We’ve set the preamp gain between 10 and 2 o’clock, should never be more. Here is the result . The sound is perfectly balanced, really closed to the guitar own acoustic sound. Here is the same guitar, with some effects by Fabrik C and R.

The second guitar is a Buclet, a custom handbuilt model with passive electronics. Preamp gain is set to 3 o’clock position. No background noise, the instrument dynamic is perfectly reproduced, the independent guitar circuitry does an excellent job (the interface automatically detects that a guitar is plugged into the instrument input). Here’s an example with compression and light reverb. And another example, with Fabrik C and R set to reproduce a kind of small amp with a spring reverb sound.

The raw recordings are excellent, and will be ideal for re-amping or post-treatment with software amp simulations. But with, on one hand, the Avalon, and on the other, the Impact II, it seems like I’m ready for various scenarios...