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In-depth Feature:  Presonus Firebox
Presonus Firebox Revisited
Albert Potts writes: .

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...continued

And Finally
In three words, the Firebox sounds "clean and quiet". The headphone volume is very generous, and I found myself keeping it below half most of the time. The converters in both directions sound good to me, providing excellent bang for buck in that regard. They sound comparable to the converters in my Presonus Central, which is to say they sound relatively neutral and uncolored. For my intended use of the Firebox, which is the playback of soft synths in a live setting, I find the unit to sound great. The converters sound better to me than what you find on a typical hardware synth.

In the same vein, the mic preamps on the Firebox are clean and usable, if not "esoteric". While generally quiet, they seem to get a bit hissy at extreme gain settings, but that’s true of virtually every budget-minded preamp I’ve ever used. Generally speaking, I find most budget gear to be less forgiving of extreme settings than expensive equipment—one of the big differences between high end and budget gear in my opinion. So for the price, I believe the Firebox preamps are very usable and you can do good work with them. If you already have favorite preamps you can plug them into the analog line inputs on the Firebox or route them through an high end external converter and connect that to the SPDIF input of the Firebox.

The cost to performance ratio of the Firebox is out of this world in my opinion, it's a bang-on winner for anyone needing an inexpensive firewire interface for a laptop-engaged musical lifestyle. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy with a purchase of musical gear under $300. In this case an oldie is also a goodie, and it’s not even that old!


Firebox in my setup

Pricing
List $559.90 - Seen for as little as $299.95/ £209.99 UK

More Resources              Articles - full listing
  • Presonus Firebox pages
  • Firebox @ SameDayMusic.com

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