Tascam US-2400
Twenty-five motorized faders for the price of a decent used car - the control surface that made a real console feel reachable again.
Overview
The pitch was simple and a little absurd: 2.5 motorized faders per finger. Tascam's own advertising leaned hard on that line, and the spec sheet backed it up. The US-2400 carried twenty-five 100mm touch-sensitive motorized faders: twenty-four channel strips plus a dedicated master. Plenty of people had spent the early 2000s mixing a 40-track session with a mouse and a single on-screen fader. For them, that many physical faders in one row was the whole argument.
The faders were 10-bit resolution. Tascam's marketing liked to point out that this was four times finer than many competing control surfaces, the difference between a fade that steps and one that glides. Each of the 24 channels also got an assignable rotary encoder ringed with LEDs, which did double duty as a position indicator and a level meter. Dedicated Mute, Solo, and Select buttons sat on every strip. The encoders handled pan, aux sends, and, depending on the DAW, plug-in parameters and EQ bands. A FLIP button let owners push automated pan or aux moves onto the faders while channel levels stayed visible on the LED rings. There was also a jog/shuttle wheel, transport buttons, a joystick for surround panning, and a footswitch jack for punch-ins.
The footprint was big: 35.75 by 15.25 inches, wide enough to dominate a desk. It had no character display of any kind, and no electronic scribble strip. The shipping unit just had blank space below the fader tracks, sized for 1-inch write-on tape. Reviewer Nick Batzdorf called that a perfectly serviceable substitute and said he was surprised how little he missed the extras found on competing products.
Connectivity was class-compliant USB, so no driver was needed. Mac OS X and Windows XP machines recognized it on plug-in. The unit presented itself to host software as three separate 8-fader banks, which is how it managed to speak so many protocols at once: native mode plus mappings for Cakewalk SONAR, MOTU Digital Performer, Apple Logic, Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo, and Digidesign Pro Tools. Pro Tools saw it as three Mackie HUIs. MOTU saw three Mackie Controls. Logic auto-configured it as a Logic Control plus two expanders, the wrong ones per Mix, but trivially corrected. Bank-up and bank-down buttons reached up to 192 channels across eight banks of 24. In Pro Tools, the joystick registered as a JLCooper MCS panner.
Mix (March 2005, p.108) put the US-2400 through Pro Tools, Cubase/Nuendo, Digital Performer, and Logic and reported the performance was "absolutely solid" in all four — the kind of line that matters more than any single spec, because a control surface that fights its host is useless no matter how many faders it has. The same review landed on the price as the real story: $1,999. Tascam's advertising framed it as a fraction of the cost of a ProControl or Control 24, and that framing was the product's reason for existing. The reviewer's verdict was that it was a perfect DAW controller for anyone who wanted lots of faders for good value.
It had limits. With no scribble strips, channels got labeled with tape. Mix also flagged a workflow snag that wasn't Tascam's fault. DAWs like Pro Tools split stereo tracks into separate left and right faders, which makes one-knob panning impossible. The reviewer had to nudge one side and hold a modifier for the other.
Today the US-2400 is a 2004-era USB controller built for operating systems that no longer exist. Modern use comes down to driver workarounds and DAW compatibility, not plug-and-play. The class-compliant USB design was certified for Mac OS X and Windows XP and nothing later, so buyers should know that going in. The hardware itself, with 25 motorized faders and LED-ringed encoders, is a lot of control surface for the money. It earned a Mix magazine "hit of the show" nod at the 2004 Winter NAMM show, and Tascam's ads wore that award for the better part of a year.
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