PreSonus 1Box Recording Kit

The PreSonus 1Box Recording Kit is a decent quality kit that you can use right from home to demo your songs with. But don’t expect to get a great quality recording from the mic. Its just not made to give you a final product. But the interface its self is just as good as the Digidesign Mbox and some of the other high model interfaces of the same size. Myself and a friend purchased this to use it just for some quick stuff on his Dell laptop and it runs great, we had a few small issues setting the interface up with his soundcard and had to call guitar center and have them walk use through it but once we figured it out it wasn’t a problem at all.

Our recording kit came with a program called Studio One which im not a fan of at all. Studio one seemed to be more of a hassle to me because it looked nothing like what I was familiar too. Its one of those programs that if you don’t start on the program before other programs you will be ok. But if you come from Cakewalk, Fl Studio or Pro tools you wont know where to start with it. But it ran great on his Vista Pc and didn’t crazy or freeze up. It does take some time to render our your projects into wav form though.


Overall, im not a fan of these bundle just because you get some cheap headphones and a cheap mic. It will do what you want it to do though. But you are better off just purchasing the interface and getting your own mic and headphones.. The quality is just ok, and it’s a hassle working with Studio one. But the inerface is a good one and works good in other DAW’s too so its not just for this package. Buy the interface and forget studio one and the mic and headphones.

In my opinion this is a good setup for someone who is just jumping into audio production,voice overs and vocal editing. It comes with the following piece of gear

Usb condenser Mic
Audio Interface
Recording Software
Headphones
Cables

I don't praise the headphones because the noise cancellation isn't to great but it's good enough to get the job done. The software it comes with is called “Studio One” which is a really good piece of software to learn on. The audio interface is has 2 channels and is powered by USB which is great. This means you can power it right from your computer rather than needing to plug it into the wall.

The mic cable isn't mogami but again it gets the job done especially when you're on fixed budget. I've used this setup for sound designing and music production on the road and I don't have any complaints about it's quality.

I do have a slight gripe with the price I feel it should cost maybe only $200.00 but again that's just a personal gripe I have. When you really look at what you're getting the price is still good. One thing they could have thrown in (2 actually) is a shock mount and a mic stand. That would really make it a all in one recording solution.

The audio quality of the mic is really good I would suggest setting up a recording area in another room or maybe In the closet this way the mic and preaamp won't pick up the humming sound of your computer or any other electronic device in the room. Oh and lastly get a popfilter this way you can eliminate plosives thus making your recording a lot more professional sounding that the average joe that takes this studio package and just records with as is in open space.

One little downside to this unit that I don't want to forget to mention is it does generate a lot of heat. So with that said you're going to want to watch what you set it on or near. I say this because some people have a tendency to place their interfaces next to other electronics such as ipods or phones etc

The Pre Sonus 1Boox was a set up a was skeptical about at first, I was looking for something affordable and powerful to use in my home set up a few years ago, I found the PreSonus 1 Box online while I was searching and decided to order it. I was surprise on how good the preamps where in this bundle. The bundle overall is a pretty good bundle, not the best on the market but what can you expect for this price range.
The mic was ok, nothing extra special with it, i tried to record a few live instruments with it and it didn’t sound too good . So I just kept it for vocals only and beware if you are going to be recording vocalist that have high pitch ranges. You can really tell that its not a high quality set up when you record those. But if you are recording hip hop lines or just some dj drops it will work perfect for your.
The headphones sound surprised me to some extent, I wouldn’t do too much mixing in them though because they aren’t that accurate, they will give something good to listen to your playbacks with.
Unfortunately I didn’t use the software that came with the package, I preferred to use the controller with my own personal software collection on my pc just because I didn’t want the learning curve of trying to figure out a brand new software that you probably aren’t going to like much anyways. But the audio controller synced with all of my daw’s without a problem.
Overall this is a great starter package, I just wish it came with some low end monitors instead of the headphones because I would rather have cheap monitors over cheap headphones. Because you can still mix in cheap monitors, but cheap headphones don’t do it for me.