PreSonus Products

PreSonus founder Jim Odom and the entire PreSonus staff are musicians first. Most of the products he and his team design are solutions to problems they have faced personally onstage and in the studio. From the space-saving FireStudio 8x8 digital interface and user-friendly Studio One DAW software to the overspec'd ADL 600 tube mic preamp and world-class StudioLive digital mixers, PreSonus is all about making lives easier for musicians everywhere. In Jim's words: "We wanted to design affordable tools to make records the right way."

A gigging guitarist since age 12, Jim got his first taste of the studio at age 15. When he couldn't convince local studios to let him and his bands book time, Jim bought a Tascam 80-8 R2R recorder and set out to learn the art of recording with support from a community of like-minded friends. Setting up shop in an operational barn, Jim and his friends recorded clients for free, insisting only that they provide their own tapes and help clean up afterward. Then, fresh out of high school, a 17-year-old Jim won a contest sponsored by DownBeat Magazine that earned him a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music.

Home from a three-year tour with RCA Records' LeRoux (Jim's main band to this day), Jim settled in to a recording position at Louisiana's Studio in the Country. There he got into the technical side of recording and decided to return to school for electrical engineering and computer science. This led to a lucrative position designing bathymetry equipment (underwater acoustic systems) for the US Navy and Coast Guard for the next several years. But bored from being out of the music scene, Jim started designing his own music products at nights and in his spare time.

Jim's stint as a recording engineer in the late '80s got him used to mixing on Neve and SSL consoles with onboard effects. Around this time compact mixing boards from Mackie, Soundcraft, and Allen & Heath began popping up in recording studios and clubs around the country. Jim missed the inline compression, gating, and automation from his console days and wanted to turn these compact boards into pro solutions. This led him to design what would become PreSonus's first product: the DCP-8.

In 1995, Jim assembled a small team of "maybe five guys" in Baton Rouge working 7 days a week to fulfill DCP-8 orders. They went on to show their product at Winter NAMM that year, impressing Guitar Player's Craig Anderton enough to name it one of his top 10 products of the show. Attendees, however, voiced a critical concern of the all-digital DCP-8: they wanted knobs, not menus. So Jim and his team removed the computer, revamped the design with mechanical parts and knobs, and renamed the new unit the ACP8. That kind of rapid response to customer feedback continues to shape the way PreSonus designs products today.

PreSonus have always been innovators in the digital I/O and interface technology games, as demonstrated by the FireStation - one of the first multi-channel FireWire interfaces and inspiration to dozens of imitators - and Central Station monitoring solution. Building on 20+ years of digital expertise are the Studio One DAW software, which combines powerful recording production with good-sense musician intuitiveness, and the 32-track Capture iPad app, which streams tracks wirelessly to a computer running Studio One.