the new Presonus Firepod?

[StrykeBack]

Hey guys,
I had a couple of people that I discuss audio over the internet raving about these new units and were told that it blows the Aardvark q10 out of the water as far as pres and converters.

Has anyone heard them before or could give me a bit of a review or know of any reviews out there?

Its about the same price that I could almost sell my aardvark q10 for and if its really that much better i just might buy into it. Though other then the Eureka I had never known of any real quality stuff from them.

What do you guys think?

Thanks,
Daniel

[JeffBarnett]

The mic preamps are very nice indeed. Remeber that PreSonus is a company that is built on preamps. That's most of their business, so it's not surprising that they'd have killer built-in pres on their interface.

Consider, too, how far converters have come in the past few years since the Q10 was introduced. It was cutting-edge for its time, but today's converters are much better on the whole than converters a few years ago.

If you are unhappy with the sound of your Q10, the Firepod could be a very good way to go.

I've listened to some recordings made with the new FirePod and I was blown away.

[StrykeBack]

Have you ever had the chance or has anyone there at sweetwater A-Bed the firepod with the q10 or with the digi or motu hardware?
Also aardvark has been known for their extremely good clock, so wasn't sure about the quality of everything with presonus...

I may just be naive and think that presonus is cheap, but then again i see my q10 dropping drastically in price lately. I just became used to seeing the presonus name with these little cheap 1 channel tube pre boxes.

[David Klausner]

Presonus has two lines of gear - their US made stuff and the little 1/2 and 1/3 rack units that are made overseas. The US made products are definitely higher quality, but for their price points, all the Presonus gear delivers great bang for the buck. If money is no object, frankly there are a number of designers out there who can deliver a stunning unit (preamp, compressor, etc.). The real trick is to be able to deliver a killer unit for a reasonable cost. That takes skill in design, in carefully matching components, in knowing how to source those components economically, and being able to streamline the manufacturing process.

Jim Odum, Presonus's president, not only has a platinum record credit in his studio background, but in another life he designed underwater sensing equipment for the US Navy. Designing gear that has to be flat from 5 Hz to 400 KHz was not only great design discipline, he also learned a lot more about the synergy of components and how to source them than many folks in our industry who didn't have the benefit of that experience. In my opinion, their US made stuff is very hard to beat in its price range. And if you associate Presonus with inexpensive gear, keep your ears tuned to reports from the AES show next month, where they will debut something in a somewhat different direction for them.

[StrykeBack]

Thanks David for enlightening me on this company. It seems that right now I'l wait it out and see what comes of the unit. I really don't have any complaints with my Q10 right now so it might not be worth the hassle. I think if I'm going to upgrade it would be to the 192 sampling rate. I saw a preview on a webpage of RME's new fireface 800. I think if I want to make the jump to newer gear it needs to be a much more marginal increase in performance and quality (granted I'm going to pay for it as well).

A quick question on the firepod. From other reviews and from people talking about it on harmony central I kept reading how people were all excited about it supporting WDM. If I'm not mistaken, though I could very well be, that that is a windows audio drive that has been much slower and less reliable then ASIO. Will the firepod use both or have they designed their interface around wdm and why?

[David Klausner]

The Firepod has both ASIO and WDM drivers (plus CoreAudio for the Mac). Which one is better for your system largely depends on the software, so some applications like Sonar seem to do better with WDM, and others, like Cubase, prefer ASIO.

[jzucker]

See my mini-review here:

http://www.sweetwater.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7110

[jzucker]

Originally posted by StrykeBack
Thanks David for enlightening me on this company. It seems that right now I'l wait it out and see what comes of the unit. I really don't have any complaints with my Q10 right now so it might not be worth the hassle. I think if I'm going to upgrade it would be to the 192 sampling rate. I saw a preview on a webpage of RME's new fireface 800. I think if I want to make the jump to newer gear it needs to be a much more marginal increase in performance and quality (granted I'm going to pay for it as well).

A quick question on the firepod. From other reviews and from people talking about it on harmony central I kept reading how people were all excited about it supporting WDM. If I'm not mistaken, though I could very well be, that that is a windows audio drive that has been much slower and less reliable then ASIO. Will the firepod use both or have they designed their interface around wdm and why?

In theory and assuming the drivers were written by equally talented software engineers, the WDM should be more efficient. However, it all depends on who wrote it and whether they were given the time to work on it properly. If an engineer spent more time on the ASIO drivers then the ASIO driver could very well be more efficient. I've been using the ASIO drivers with Sonar and I get can 2ms latency

[JeffBarnett]

Did you post that review on the FirePod (http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Firepod/reviews/#anchor) page of Sweetwater's website?

If you haven't, you should. It's very helpful.

[jzucker]

Originally posted by JeffBarnett
Did you post that review on the FirePod (http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Firepod/reviews/#anchor) page of Sweetwater's website?

If you haven't, you should. It's very helpful.

I didn't even realize you could. I just did after seeing your post.