Just Bought a Presonus Firebox

I just bought a Presonus Firebox and since comments from a lot of people here helped me to make that decision I thought I would add my experience to help others who might be trying to make up their minds.

First, I chose it because I wanted a low-cost solution for digital audio that included MIDI and SPDIF. I primarily play all instruments myself, at this point one at a time 🙂 so 6 ins is more than I usually need. I like the small footprint on the desktop too.

I read mostly positive things about sound quality and I have to say I am impressed with it, amazed in fact at the quality for the price. I find it very clean and balanced across the spectrum that I can hear.

The other big factor was that a number of people told me that Presonus has good technical support. I have to say that in my experience they are great. Outstanding. I had a number of issues that weren't covered in the manual and I got very quick and helpful feedback that was always accurate. In case anyone else runs into them, here they are with the solutions:

At first the unit seemed dead. The front light went blue-red-off and stayed off. Plugging in the adapter got it working fine, and afterwards the unit worked without the adapter just fine (i.e. powered via Firewire).

The manual seems to tell you to right-click on the Firebox Control Panel to set the CPU speed but the right-click does nothing. It turns out that this is only for Windows XP, and the manual is unclear about this. No big deal.

SPDIF wouldn't work. Core Audio should have detected it but didn't. Presonus sent me a modified Hardware Control that allowed me to choose SPDIF and now it works just fine.

I was really impressed with the help I got from tech support. I should add that I made it clear that I had read the entire manual and tried everything I could to make it work before I contacted them, so this may have inclined them to be more responsive. In any case, they were great.

I hope this is helpful to someone.

Chet