Premier Rock Forum

Hello....

I'm curious about who out there has had good or
bad experiences with PreSonus equipment.
I'm currently embroiled in an argument about
the company on a local music message board.
I live in Baton Rouge, the city where PreSonus
is located, and am in the awkward (well, not
really, because I don't give a shit) position of
talking trash about the equivalent of "local
boy done good". I guess I'm looking for
some justification.

Myself, I've had a chance to use only two of
their products.. the Tube Pre (a dual tube preamp)
which came broken out of the box. I took it
over to their place, they fixed it. Three uses
later, it broke again. I took it back and they
fixed it. At that point, I'd basically written it
off. Then a few months ago I figured I'd run
something through it to distort it for whatever
reason. It sounded like crap. I ended up
running whatever it was through a ProCo Rat
to greater effect. I later had an MIT EE friend
tell me that the Tube Pre uses such a low
plate voltage that they put an LED behind the
tube to make it "glow". hahahhah


Anyway... the Tube Pre has since been retired
to my practice space PA system where it
joined the "Smart Compressor" that someone
left at my house a few years ago. (If someone
leaves something at your house, chances are
it's garbage). The Smart Compressor works
better than having no compressor, but every
once in awhile it starts cycling some sort of
bad low frequency waveform. The solution to
this is usually to thump on the microphone and
then turn to our guitarist, an EE student who
wants to work for an audio company, and say
"You want to work for Presonus? Why don't
you start right here and fix these pieces of shit?"

Anyway... that aside, I'm also curious who knows
more about the rumored back-channel tie between
Guitar Center and Presonus. A friend that works
for GC told me that GC gives them seed money
for products and the PreSonus is now essentially
a Guitar Center house brand. I've noticed that
there always seems to be a disproportionate amount
of PreSonus gear in the sales floor racks (along
with features in the Musician's Friend catalog... same
parent company, right?). I'm not so naive as to
think that these arrangements don't occur to certain
degrees in all kinds of big business, but I do have
a problem with the ethics where two companies have
a vested profit interest, the distribution and the
marketplace to sell inferior products whilst
maintaining the facade of being two completely
separate businesses: a pro audio company and an
unbiased retailer.

Most people I know who have a FirePod have good
things to say about it. But I figured this board
would be a little more knowledgeable and diverse
than the local kids I know who have them.

Comments?

Tak'er easy,
Fred

There was a pretty good interview with the founder of Presonus in a recent issue of TapeOp. He sounded like a decent enough fellow. Actually I was quite impressed at some of the things he revealed in the article, like the fact that the company is friendly to people modding their pieces, which is pretty much unheard of. He said they also put sockets on some of their pieces so people can swap out opamps and stuff too.

I don't own any Presonus gear, so I can't really comment on how it might sound. I would venture to guess that the cheaper pieces sound...well... cheap, and are probably made by people who were sewing garments together last week. The more expensive stuff probably sounds better and has better quality control.

Well, my shop has a PreSonus 8-channel rackmount compressor. It was broken when we bought it, but after having fixed it, I must say that it is effective for live sound racks. For recording, however, it operates like any cheap, relatively colorless-except-for-cheap compressor (re: Behringer). For problem-solving budgetmongers only...

I own two pieces of Presonis gear. The mono half rack tube pre. It is great as a DI or to warm up a mike. It is a lot subtler than a RAT pedal which is useful for me. On the unit you can swap out the 12AX7 tube other ones which is useful if you are trying to get some different kind of tones. It is very quiet unless driven full up and then there is some very minor hiss. Use it a lot and it is useful especially for bass DI.

I also own a Firepod. The pre amps sound great, the drivers work perfectly first time. I also like the fact that I can chain a second one in if I need more inputs. No hassles no problems no returns.

I don't notice GC pushing Prosonis gear over any other they sell; they certainly don't have it displayed as prominently as the digi interfaces.

I do home recording, and this unit is essentially puts the right number of inputs with decent preamps at the right price point. I believe that compared to a lot of other equipment that it offers a lot of value for the price.

So often people do the apples to oranges thing with Presonis stuff. I make no claims that you will be throwing out your high end pre-amps to use one of these guys but it sounds better than most of the mixing boards that people use in the home recording environment. Using decent microphones. The recording quality is great - clear and it has nice range and seems to be able to handle bass frequcies better than most competing units. It does a fine job in one box - with volume knobs for each input channel - so you don't have to control it using a software interface. I used to use cassette 4 tracks to do home recording the Firepod does it a lot better at the same price. It is easy to transport with my laptop and external drive for location work if I want to record, drums at a rehearsal studio or do a demo for a friend’s band.

So my experience is good with Presonis. Like how it sounds, does not break, works as advertised.

I have a Digimax LT and have had no problems with it.

I used to own a presonus firestation. It was easy enough to setup and use - never had any problems with it. Every sound that passed through it sounded similar....boosted midrange, pretty loud. Not very dynamic, not much depth to the sound. The sytek pre's I bought later were infinitely better than the presonus ones.

Overall, I'd say they're ok....I have no idea why someone would pay $1200 for those digimax pre's though....jeez.

Anyone use the mp20 or m80? Are they still able to be fitted with jensen transformers?

I've got a two channel tube/solid state preamp I bought in new 2001. It works and sounds pretty good in my opinion. Its been very reliable. With the tube drive up it really thickens up bass and electric guitars. I also have a Firebox firewire interface that I use with my laptop... it also works well... the pre's on it are noticeably noisier than many of my others though. But it does what I need it to do.

Their linux support has yet to materialise in any way. I heard some linux-friendly intimations somewhere on the interweb about the firepod but nothing exists as of yet -

It's a pain in the ass for me....I don't want to have to buy a mac or a windows license just to use a device to record rehersals with.