This is my preliminary review of the presonus Firepod 8 channel firewire interface
Price Paid - $470 B stock
As far as I can tell it was classified as B stock because it had some paint runs in the final finish but they wont be seen once its in the rack.
This unit comes with 8 presonus pre amps that have a very unigue sound, especially with certain tones, for instance, the c# on the G string of a strat. Kind of a singy kind of tone, I happen to like it but its a personal preference thing. Overall they have 45db of headroom and i couldnt get them to distort with a guitar plugged into one of the instrument inputs and ran all the way up.
If you have been using a sound card for computer recording this will take the place of it and you can send the sound card off to do light duty for the computer or get rid of it all together.
It has separate cue and main mixes for zero latency monitoring and also has a nice clean headphone send that is going to be loud enough for all but the most brutal headphone mixes
Came with the latest ASIO and WDM drivers and loaded seamlessly with Cakewalk Sonar 4. It comes with Cubase LE but im not a fan of that software so I didnt try it.
I also usually track vocals into a VS-890 and then transfer them to sonar because i love the mtk compressor vocal setting in it. I ran a vocal track into the 890 and turned the onboard pres down to just a crack and ran up the Firepod pres, big difference, I like them better than the ART MP that i normally use through the 890. Again this may be a personal preference thing,but i could tell.
It has Line outs that act the same as a channel insert for those of us who love our old outboard gear, works great with a compressor and EQ chained together with no added distortion that i could hear.
Overall this is a great unit for the price as far as I can tell, If I have any problems later Ill repost.
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Actually, Im QUITE serious
