Last Christmas, I decided to make myself a gift I’ve long been putting off: buying myself an external audio interface to further my ambition of becoming a music producer. After much deliberation and a good, hard look at my bank account, I decided to buy the Tascam US-144mkII, because it was part of a bundle at Musician’s Friend. And once again, I realized that you get what you pay for.

The sound quality is very good. However, the interface crashes at random intervals throughout the day. On a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, I frequently got the Blue-Screen-of-Death blaming tascusb2.sys. There was no warning. Computer could be on for hours before doing it, or not. I haven’t been able to discern a pattern as to when it happens — it happens most often when I listen to music, but sometimes it will crash when I’m doing nothing at all with it.

Installing the newest drivers from the Tascam Website actually made my system crash more often than the old drivers. The interface also takes 20% of CPU power to run on a Core 2 Quad Laptop, even when I’m doing nothing with it. The Interface actually crashed my PC once while I was writing this review!

Appearantly, this is a problem that existed with the previous model of the US-144 as well. Google it; there are hundreds of reports online of people having the same — unresolved! — issues as me, and thousands of reports regarding Tascam’s worthless customer support. The instruction manual is also littered with typos.

Support is the worst ever, telling me to disable my antivirus software and firewall (not an option due to security concerns, but even when I did do it for an hour, my system crashed again), and outright lying to me, saying that Mac users don’t have issues with the Tascam Audio Interface, when there are documented cases of problems getting it to work on a Mac. I have never, ever dealt with less capable customer support. They might as well hire a bunch of baboons to copy and paste their crappy cookie-cutter responses.

Bottom line: When the thing works, it outputs some nice, clear sound for the price. Unfortunately it’s nearly unusable due to constant crashing, latency issues and worthless support. Stay away until they put out some new drivers, which they have been promising for nearly two years. Actually, stay away from TASCAM. They are the worst company ever.