PreSonus FirePod

Ok recently i got a firepod and its been pretty good to me thus far. i really havent any problems that other newbies wouldnt have.

Comes with about a 3 ft. Firewire cord, which is kind of short BUT its free. so if you just want to have your pres all the way across the room you might need a longer cable. Also comes with Cubase LE, which like others ive read, i havent used very much because im already so accustomed to Reaper. but neverthe less again FREE software and DAW.

mainly thus far ive recorded a little bit of vocals, but mostly electric and acoustic guitars. In my recordings ive had no noise whatsoever. this is a HUGE step up from the fostex studio in a box i was using before. MUCH better sound quality.

its pretty easy, just watch your meters in your DAW and set the trim so nothing goes over about 12 db or so and youre good to roll.

its a rack unit so as long as youre kind to it, itll be kind to you. seems pretty tough and although i wouldnt throw it around or anything, it could pobably withstand some beating.

havent had to deal with Presonus

So far ive had this unit about 3 weeks or so and its been just as i expected. way better sound quality than i was used to recording with and is pretty easy to use once you get the drivers set up and sort of understand how a lot of things work.

i think thats the problem a lot of people will complain about a lot is not being able to function the unit correctly. TAKE TIME TO READ everything you possibly can BEFORE you try to push buttons and turn knobs. once you understand how everything works together its really not all that difficult.

Took it out of the box . . .Plugged it in to power. Took the cables out of my mixer, and plugged them into the firepod. Fired up my laptop installed the drivers, connected up my monitors . . .Done! The easiest piece of recording hardware I ever installed!

Sound quality is great, not professional, but then again neither am I. I'm still learning on the recording side of things. I was using a Tascam US-224 with a 16 track mixer. Could only get 2 seperate tracks to the computer that way. With the Firepod I can do 8 individual mono tracks or 4 stereo! With much better sound quality than the previous setup. I'm going to pick up another one. You can daisy chain 2 firepods together for 16 tracks simultaneously!

Had it for a month and no problems, yet, what so ever! No clicks, no pops, I'm using it with an Acer laptop, Windows Vista Home Premium, Core 2 Duo at 1.6ghz, and 3gigs of ram.

Never had to call them so a definite 10!

I've bought a lot different stuff in my 20yrs of playing music, and this is one of the best deals out there! I'm very happy I bought this and hope it continues to work flawlessly as it has so far! I've read some of the bad reviews, and I am surprised. I guess I should consider myself lucky. I'm definitely buying another one, we'll see how the daisy chaining goes . . . (The $699 price came with a whole package with 2 small monitors a couple mics, cables and stands.)

This is a recording interface with rack ears so therefore can be rackmounted or can be used sat on a desktop.
It has clip indicators for every channel.
A Sturdy metal case which seems very hard wearing.
Volume controls are also metal...very close together so slightly fiddly.

Its a firewire interface and works with MAC OS X Leopard and Tiger and Windows

The pre-amps are very good.
It has 2 dedicated instrument inputs which can also be coupled as mic inputs...8 inputs in total which can either be XLR or Jack.
1 midi in and 1 midi out
1 headphone out jack with independent volume.

The card is AC powered with an adaptor
It has phantom power on all channels

It came with a few other various bits of software...never used any of them.

It's a good all rounder but nothing particular special. It's worth its price if you are looking at spending around ??220 you wont be disspointed.

Was easy to use - WHEN IT WORKED!!! Driver/firmware updates took 2 years to release, and they crashed down all units, making them unusable. Computer won't even recognize they are connected anymore. 1000's of others have reported same issue, hunks of s**t, they don't work!

TONS of people have reported pops,crackles,drop outs, and MANY other sound quality issues. I saw LOTS of problems with mine, when it actually DID kind of work. It sounded like rice crispies most of the time, and spent more time resetting the unit then actually recording with it!

As explained previously, it RARELY worked AT ALL, and when it did, it worked like junk. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM PRESONUS. If you want ANY kind of reliability - GO ELSEWHERE.....

These people are nothing short of a complete joke! they took nearly a month to respond to the dozens of emails I sent, and then responded to some other person's question by accident. When I DID finally did get a response to MY question, their answer was: "send it in to us at $85.00 charge plus shipping, and we'll look at it". They caused the unit to go down with a bad driver/firmware update, and now they WANT ME TO PAY????

DO NOT buy ANYTHING from this company - BEWARE!!!!!!

Their products are HORRIBLE, drivers are a NIGHTMARE, support is USELESS, and they are just a bunch of crooked criminals that should be put OUT OF BUSINESS for their unethical and irresponsible business practices.

Setup was a snap. Only problem i had was my own fault (forgot to switch to ASIO drivers) Didnt bother updating because of a possible flaw in the newer driver so i just stayed with the one that came with the unit. If it aint broke....dont break it!

Only reason i gave it a six is compared to other higher end preamps there OK. But for the price range its in, its a TEN. You cant expect to much for only 500 bucks. Most people see 500 and freak, but they are the ones that have never seen (or dont even know) what boutique stuff is.

Never quit on me once. Had butter fingers one time and dropped it (pretty far, pretty fast), bent the rack flanges a tiiiiiiny bit. Plugged the unit in, worked fine.

Never had to deal with them with this unit, but with my Firestudio I've had nothing but good luck. Quick responses, no mess, no BSing me around.

If i were to want to downgrade my gear, i would buy another one. If anyone of my buddies were looking for a lower priced, 10 input pre, I would tell them to buy this unit. Prefer not to send my friends to the wolves and dont enjoy being made a fool of when something doesnt work for them, but i am confident in this unit and all other Presonus gear. Got a decent PC that isnt a hacked together P.O.S that you play WoW on and only do music, then this guy is for you!

I use the Firepod of multi track play back for a large theater production. There have been a couple times that I had to use my back up plan in the middle of a the show because I had to restart it. I need it to work every single time for what I use it for. If I was just recording, I'd give it a 10.

This is a rackmont. 8 preamps. 1 Clip indicator.
Generally the idea is a good one.. When the preamp work they sound good. But general overall there is so many problem with this thing. This is by far the worst piece of gear I have every owned.

connecting is through firewire.. They give a firewire cord. Which is to short and you have to buy an after market one that's longer. There is constant problems with communication from computer to firepod and vis versa..

Preamp quality is not bad. Only if you can get it working.

Power supply seems ok.

Tech specs seem good on the box.. and that's where it ends..
Shit. If you change the sample rit it does not work.

It comes with Cubase LE.. which I do not use and do not want to have to learn a whole new DAW to use.

This is the worse thing I ve ever bought.. Support is shit.. After 3 months of trying everything they mentioned. They finally said send it in. Well that's another 200.00 in shipping for something new that should work..For the love of God if you buy one of these you will regreat it.. I promise you that.

Installation was effortless. The manual is good. However sound quality got in the way of doing useful mixing using it.

Frequency response is very colored. Midrange frequencies are missing. Listening to familiar material makes them sound colder. Instruments that had reverb applied sound strangely less reverbed in the case where a lot of the referb effect is in the mids. Other than that, sounds brittle but free of noise. Bass response is good.

I returned it within a couple of days of buying it. Drivers seemed stable in my experience at least.

I never had to contact their customer support.

I rate this as unusable due to the audio quality issues. I play electronica type of rock including bass, electric guitar, analog synths. I've been playing and recording for 15 years. I returned this and got a Echo Audiofire 12. I needed a lot of inputs but had a couple of mic preamps I could use, so this suited my purposes. The Audiofire 12's sound quality is sweeter, not brittle, cold and colored as the Firepod.

ok... i bought this to record a 5 piece band. previously i had used a powered mixer and ran the stereo output to the 1/8" input on my computer. the firepod gives me the ability to mix those tracks after we've recorded and to apply effects to specific tracks. it helps too that it has 2 output busses. we run the main output to the powered mixer using it as a power amp and just run vocals to that for our singer, and then run the other tracks to the monitor bus which goes to our headphones. if you know what you're doing the features are perfect for live situations and recording.

it was pretty easy to set up, although i consider myself highly skilled in computing technology, and using a mac helps because it has preloaded drivers (no installing software off a cd). just plug it in, set it up in your preferred recording software and you're good to go.

midi interface works like a charm, along with spdif. power switch on the back might be my only complaint about this thing.

i'm not a sound engineer. i'm not a professional recording guru. but i do know that i spent $400 on a piece of equipment that gives me very good sounding "demo" quality songs with about 10 minutes of mixing and adding software effects. much better than anything i would've gotten from running from my old powered mixer.

i can't really comment a whole lot on comparing the quality of the pre-amps which most people seem to have a problem with on here, but i can say this: i have recorded in million dollar pre-amps and equipment at my college. i have recorded on the same neve board that AC/DC recorded their back in black album on. in each of these cases though there was a shitty engineer behind the controls, and that made the entire mix sound like it was done in someone's basement. there is no replacement for having someone that knows what they are doing at the helm.

so with that said, i'm really not the one that should be behind the controls on this piece of equipment either, but i do know that the firepod has helped me learn a lot and i believe that given time and guidance i could be able to produce professional quality recordings on the firepod.

some people have also complained about popping and clicking in their recordings. this happens when your computer isn't fast enough for the latency settings you have in your software (latency = dsp samples / project sample rate). although i have noticed that once i start getting pops and clicks from too few samples, even after raising the samples the clicks are still there, but unplugging and reconnecting the firepod solves this.

this thing has always worked great for me.

never had to deal with them really. the only thing i've done is upgraded the firmware which was quick and painless.

i think this is the second review i have written on here, so i don't write these a lot. after reading all the negative reviews, however, i felt i should put my two cents in because i believe this product is great. i have not had a problem with it, and i believe the people complaining about it are the people who don't know what they are doing.

to put this in context: i have a very good friend who i have let borrow the firepod from time to time. i consider him to be capable but no expert at computers and technology. almost every time he borrows it he has some sort of problem where he can't get something working or the sound isnt correct or he cant get inputs to work. he'll call me and i'll tell him exactly what he has to do to fix it. viola it works.

anyways the firepod is great. it might not be super professional, but capable in my opinion as long as you've got the technical know how and audio recoding and mixing chops to handle the job.

Didn't need it, yet.

The Firepod (now called FP10) is one of those rare devices which caught my sympathy. It's sturdy and intuitive to handle. The drivers are rock solid and very well programmed in terms of compatibility in my experience. (I already worked with a lot of external interfaces) And on top of that it sounds just great for the price. I wouldn't recommend using the Firepod's preamps with a SM7 or a ribbon mic and also wouldn't recommend pushing them past the 3 o' clock position if you mustn't, but apart from that those preamps performed nothing but well in my latest productions. The conversion is also better than you would assume for the price in my opinion. Overall, I think the Firepod is a clear winner.