Presonus Interfaces

Looking to get a reasonably credible external audio / midi box for my new lappy.

The Presonus boxes look to have the specs and form factor I'm looking for.

Any owners on WATMM? Experiences? Impressions?

tx

I can tell you that, like everything else that has ever been constructed, Sound on Sound thinks they're just great!

Actually fuck Presonus, they havent even got Vista64 drivers for the FireStudio yet (though they do for the lower end FirePod).

My new Lappy is running Sonar 7 native 64 on Vista 64, btw.

The Alesis IO26 and the Focusrite Saffire look OK, and there's something called the MOTU Traveller, but that seems to have less analogue ins than I need...

Does anyone own any of these things?

I heard (recent) Alesis build quality was supposed to be shit?

I guess latency (for monitoring) and IO quality are my biggest concerns.

I seriously would upgrade to XP for running music apps, especially since MS just recently said thanks to the EEE and other tiny ass laptops, that XP is going to be supported basically up until the next Windows release anyway. Vista is basically the new Windows ME it's so bad.

Yep ok, but then I would have no drivers for half the hardware built in to my laptop. Rock / Hard Place.

I'm trying to build a rig that will last a few years and audio people are going to have to bite the bullet on Vista sooner or later.

Also, clean installing Vista makes a huge difference compared to all the bundled shit you get on there.

I think it'll be easy to just skip Vista, with XP being supported until the next version of Windows anyway, but really now that Renoise runs in Linux, I'm seeing less and less of any sort of incentive to run it anyway. Sucks about built in hardware on the laptop though, nobody has any haxxed user created drivers? People usually get up in arms about that sort of thing anyway. I guess thats another good reason to stick with desktops built from parts.

ok, ok, but this isnt an OS thread.

can ppl tell me what external interfaces they have and whether they like them plz?

I have a Phonic Helixboard 12 Firewire. It's basically a 12 channel mixer that sends it's 12 channels to the PC seperately each at 24bit/96khz. It sounds great, feels like I could kill someone with it, and I'm currently running it in Renoise rock solid at 0.5ms latency. I can actually get it to play with 0.2ms latency, but I got a little bit of burping if I added more than 3 instances of Altiverb so I left it at 0.5.

They also offer it in 16 and 18 channel versions if you need more. The 12 channel one has 4 mic/line mono channels and 4 stereo pair channels.

I had a presonus firebox and it didnt work properly from day one, constant glitches and cutouts.

Then it started permanently conking out about 3-4 minutes of use and not coming back on. Apart from every other day when it would decide to stay on for a good couple of hours and THEN fuck up just when i was getting into things. Temperamental piece of shit. I sent it back to presonus to get it fixed, it worked properly for about 2 weeks and then just started turning itself off again. It started thinking it was syncd to my computer when my computer wasn't even fucking on.

In the end i gave up, got a desktop and a delta 1010, never had any trouble.

In my experience, presonus are shit.

if you got a PCMCIA slot,get an E-MU 1616m

  Quote

Mastering grade 24-bit/192kHz converters - the same A/D converters used in Digidesign's flagship ProTools HD 192 I/O Interface delivering an amazing 120dB signal-to-noise ratio

 

Ultra-portable MicroDock M offers 16 inputs/16 outputs plus MIDI I/O - everything from balanced analog and turntable inputs to ADAT and S/PDIF (switchable to AES/EBU)

 

Two E-MU XTC™ studio-grade, ultra-low noise preamps (-127dBu EIN) with analog soft limiter - Mic/Line and true Hi-Z inputs via Neutrik connectors, 48V phantom power and 60dB of gain

 

Hardware-accelerated effects - over 600 standalone and E-MU Power FX VST plug-in effects with no CPU overhead

 

I/O Configuration:

 

 

Two E-MU XTC™ Ultra-low Noise Mic/Line/Hi-Z Preamps with Soft Limiter and 48V Phantom Power (-129dBu EIN) Four 1/4" Balanced Inputs Six 1/4" Balanced Outputs Turntable Input (w/ground lug and hardware RIAA preamp) 24-bit/192kHz ADAT In/Out (switchable to S/PDIF) 24-bit/192kHz coaxial S/PDIF Out (switchable to AES/EBU) Two sets of MIDI In/Out Stereo 1/8" Speaker Outputs (configurable from stereo to 5.1) Two Stereo Headphone/Line Outputs (one on card, one on MicroDock M)

all for 420/450 $ on ebay

Thanks to the folks on here I picked up the mighty fine Audiofire4 interface ( http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/FireWire...Fire4/index.php ). And yep it seems to support Vista64 (according to the readme with the drivers anyway). It's completely stable, build well solidy and the latency is as low as a ghetto pimp's morals.

  mcbpete said:

Thanks to the folks on here I picked up the mighty fine Audiofire4 interface ( http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/FireWire...Fire4/index.php ). And yep it seems to support Vista64 (according to the readme with the drivers anyway). It's completely stable, build well solidy and the latency is as low as a ghetto pimp's morals.

Thanks. Will take a look at the echo