PreSonus Pre-amplification

When looking to fill out my pre-amp rack for my remote recording rig, I stumbled across presonus' new toy. It is a 8-channel digital mic pre-amp, all in a single rack space unit. I found the best price at the time was though an online web store. And the price tag of $1,100 was a great deal for such a great peice of gear. With it's switchable phantom on each channel, phase switching on the first two channels, pad buttons and Enhance buttons, I was finding that this toy had quite a number of features. each channel had a dual servo knob allowing both gain control and access to a very musical limiter (so you don't clip your inputs). Inputs are all balanced XLR. The ouput section is where the boys at presonus had some fun...you have the ability to feed 3 sources at the same time: ADAT lightpipe, S/PDIF AES/EUB, and balanced 1/4" . I personally use the lightpipe to feed into a MOTU 2408 and the 1/4" feed in to my Soundcraft mixer ...the possibilites seem endless. To get to how it sounds....crystal clean pre-amplification! With plenty of headroom to spare the amps are well worthe the grand you spend on it. It's great to do all your drum tracks I read that the band FIlter used it for that purpose for their latest album. The enhance button is added for use with acoustic guitars, overheads, room mics or anything that could use a little taken out around 1K . And finally to make sure that everyone is on the same page, there is that nifty little word clock section allowing sync to 32K, 44.1K or 48 K . I really haven't found much to complain about yet. Very rugged steel front plate, silver in color. Cool blue knobs line the front with signal LED's (green for signal, yellow for limiting, and red for clipping) soft touch buttons for phase, enh, and pad turn green when engaged. Sync section with either internal clock or external (switchable) A lot of care went into constructing such a compact yet useful piece of gear. It's at least worth it to try it out on yor next project....as I said, it's great for keeping your remote system more compact. This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com