Presonus Studiolive 16/4/2
Contents |
General Information
Original Author: Staffay
Weapon: Live/Studio Mixer with integrated soundcard
Make: Presonus
Model: Studiolive 16/4/2
Price: 2500€
Introduction
Presonus is an american company that manufactors mostly studio products in the semi-professional range, and are known for their Firestudio series of soundcards as well as good prizes vs. features on their products. StudioLive is an unique product since it's in-cooperate both a digital mixer and a 16-channel soundcard, making it extremely versatile in both handling and feature-wise. It has not really any competitors on the market, since You have to buy a separate mixer, audio-interface + soundcard for the digital mixers available. But a good guess is that the other manufactorers will follow this concept, since it's really is built for musicians on the move, and enables You to record Your live-concerts as well as doin pre-productions in You own home with the same equipment.
Technical Description
The heart of this machine is really the "Fat-channel", which is a combined gate, compressor, four band parametric EQ, High-pass filter and limiter. This features can be used on all channel & busses all over the mixer. It is connected to a computer via FireWire and all channels, busses etc. can be sent and received via a 32*18 interface. It has 16 mic/line XMAX preamps which has been borrowed from the FireStudio series, these have plenty of headroom and is quite as a mice. There is 6 AUX-channels available for using with effects/monitor -systems as well as a talkback system that works on all auxes + main. An outstanding feature is that You can store a mix-setup as a "scene", which means that with a push of a button, You can recall Your bands live-settings for every parameter on the entire console.
There is in addition to this two separate digital effects which can be routed anywhere in the signal-flow. It has S/PDIF outputs as well balanced pre-fader outputs for routing to other environments. Also there is insert points on every channel as well as direct outputs, that can be routed before or after the "fat-channnel". What it dont have though, is ADAT-compatible interface or any type of synchronization features. (which may be implemented later by firmware updates and some additional hardware) There is solo-in-place functions for studio-use as well as normal solo for stage use, which can be switchable by just pushing and holding a button. The mixer is a small piece of gear and sits easily on top of a standard rack unit. A point of interest is also that this piece of gear operates internaly on a 32-bit floating point frequency.
The soundcard part of this gear has also borrowed it's AD/DA -converters from the Firestudio series and have a very good conversion and dynamic range contrary the price, of course there are better converters available, but then You have to pay twice as much for just a pair of converters vs. what this gear costs. Comparing to converters in te same price-range I found them as good as the other manufactorers. The card supports sample rates of 44.1 and 48 kHZ, which may be annoying to some - where did the 96 kHx and 192 kHz go???? This is however not an issue, since these frequencies are mostly used for advanced masteríng and maybe in high-end studios with outboard gear that can operate on these frequencies.
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