Presonus Firebox Reviews?, Anyone actually use this yet? Options

[ArchivalAudio]

wondering if anyone has actually used the new PreSonus FireBox? Its been available in Europe for a month now... and just became available here in the US. I am wondering if any has tried this unit out... I am strongly considering gettting one. I would like to hear any reviews of this new interface.

any opinions?
power consumption in the feild? etc.

thanx
-- Ian

[arvidtp]

I'm with you - just got my Ultralite a few days ago

Used it for a gig the 2nd day I had it and it was flawless. I can run DSP live that I could not with the Firebox - for my band I've been wanting to run a basic session in Logic with reverb (for our vocalist), delay (for my trumpet) and a an EXS24 sampler, at the same time as a rather demanding patch I wrote in Max/MSP for the wireless wind controller I built. With the firebox, I could not get them both to run at once at a reasonable latency without without MaxMSP freezing up and crapping out...

But now with the ultralite, I can suddenly do it on the exact same computer! Congrats MOTU, you rock.

Pres are nice and quiter than the firebox. Also I can turn the main outs all the way up, and jack my amplifier way up, and hardly hear any noise in my speakers! The output is so quiet. And no more whine from Processor Nap - no more need to run a script to turn it off all the time.

The attention to detail in the interface is astounding - from the flash memory with presets for the internal mixer that can be saved either from the computer or the front panel and recalled with or without a computer, to the ability to record back mix 1, which can include the computer's output.

A killer feature for me is the ability to clock-sync through coreaudio - the MOTU can grab its clock from ANY coreaudio interface connected to your mac, without connecting via S/PDIF or any other physical connection! This is awesome for aggregate devices, as you are no longer relying on always imperfect jitter compensation code - the devices are synced. I've tried this for about 8 minutes - no clicks or pops, vs. clicks/pops after about 3 1/2 min when aggregating the same audio interfaces running under their own clocks.

This rocks when the MOTU is aggregated with Cycling'74's Soundflower virtual audio device. I created a new aggregate device of MOTU + Soundflower (16 ch), set the agg. dev's clock to soundflower, then synced the MOTU's clock to soundflower's. This basically adds 16 additional channels of virtual software-to-software I/O to the MOTU interfafce for sending audio back and forth between, say, Max/MSP and Logic! And it works flawlessly (so far) - no clicks or pops, minimal CPU overhead. Make sure to sync to the correct soundflower, as the MOTU clock menu does not specify which is the 2 channel version and which is the 16... so I chose the 2nd one because on my system the 16 chan one appears 2nd in the audioMIDI setup menu. And make sure to A) remember that the corresponding soundflower ins and outs will be offset by 2, B) Not make feedback loops with soundflower

This post has been edited by arvidtp: Sat 5 Jan 2008, 01:20