Lets start from the beginning…
I got a Darkglass Element that appeared to have been a return. The touch sensor button seemed to be having a problem and I returned it before I had a chance to test out all the functionality.
I had decided I wasn’t going to get another one because I wasn’t getting real helpful answers for some of my questions from Darkglass. I think part of the problem is the people that do their customer service don’t understand all the functionality of the Element. Some of the answers I got were completely wrong.
Then, I got another Darkglass Element and here is what I learned over the weekend playing music with my son and experimenting with whatever we could.
My thanks to @DaveT for helping with the technical questions. His help gave me the confidence to move forward with all the stuff I wanted to try out and was the biggest determining factor in deciding to give the Element another chance.
The Instrument IN can be used to plug IN an instrument.
The Instrument OUT can be used to plug IN an instrument.
The Aux IN can be used to plug IN an Instrument (using a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter).
You can use guitar on one, bass on one, and drum machine (keyboard, or whatever else you like) on the third with two people plugged in to the two headphone outs and… It sounds Amazing!
It has great definition, plenty of loudness, and a tremendous amount of versatility. I can’t imagine a better headphone amp.
The instrument OUT can also be used as an amp IN so you can place it between your amp and cabinet. What I had been trying to figure out was if I could go from the parallel speaker out on my son’s Vox AC15 to the amp IN to be able to record him and still get the tone of the Vox on the recording.
I set it up like this and it worked through the headphone OUTs. We were getting a lot of interference and some really weird sounds when he would hit some low notes. Then I turned on a guitar amp sim and all of that cleared up. It worked flawlessly.
I still don’t understand what was going on with the amp sim versus without the amp sim and why that cleaned everything up but it sounded great.
I did run into a pretty big problem. When I hooked it up to my laptop, the Darkglass Suite software said the Element needed an update. I ran the firmware update for version 3.1. The Element rebooted itself. And… it never talked to the laptop again. So, I was never able to test the DAI capability. Sh!t. Now I’m stuck.
I talked to the manager at the Athens, GA Guitar Center and he recommended returning it, saying it wasn’t worth waiting to see if they would fix this and end up missing the return window.
If the DAI had worked, at even a basic level, I would keep it. We really had a great time experimenting and playing with it.
If anybody is running firmware version 3.1 (the newest release), let me know if it works for you.
Who knows, I may end going for a third Element but for the time being, I think I’m going to just get an Audio Interface and revisit this sometime later.