Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Brand New Review for Nov 2010:
I recommend this only if: 1) you are not recording a guitar with high output pickups through the instrument-in, because it will clip even with the gain turned all the way down on the AudioBox, 2) you are not using an SM57 or some other dynamic mic that requires more than 35dB of gain, otherwise it will be too quiet, and 3) your headphones have an impedance above 100 ohms, otherwise the USB-powered Audiobox can't keep up with the current draw and will have no bass in the headphone monitoring out.
If you meet those conditions, then this is a great, affordable, stable recording interface. On my Mac it's plug-n-play, both on my older G4 powerbook with Tiger and newer 2010 Mac Mini with Snow Leopard. On the Mac, no separate software or drivers are needed. The construction of the AudioBox is very good. All metal box, and metal knobs. The blue metal looks great.
The mic preamps sound pretty darn good, crystal clear if you're using a condenser mic. For recording vocals on condensers, this interface is great. If you're on an old system, however, recording direct guitar and running it through a virtual amp simulation will give you latency problems. Not as much on Core 2 Duo systems and above. Be advised that the zero-latency monitoring is for a clean signal going in, not the processed sound from your software plugin, thus you can't do zero-latency distorted guitar recording that way unless you listen to yourself play clean while recording.
Now officially this does not have line-level recording ability. So you can't take the headphone output from a walkman, guitar amp, or mp3 player into this. But actually that does work as long as you carefully keep the line signal volume low and plug it into the instrument jack on the AudioBox. I've done this and it records just fine. But if the line volume gets turned up too high, you risk burning out the chip inside the AudioBox, since it wasn't engineered with safety mechanisms for that, thus Presonus says it doesn't do line-in.
It gets 4 stars for what it does well, and minus 1 star because of the caveats / exceptions listed at the beginning. As with all gear buying, my honest recommendation is to save up and get something 1.5X the cost of what you thought you could afford. If I could do it all over again, I would get an Echo Audiofire 4, Focusrite Saffire Pro 14, or Apogee Duet and call it a day. But, my Audiobox has served me well for over two years now, made some great clear recordings, right up until I got new headphones with too low impedance and the bass dropped out.
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