Presonus Inspire vs Firebox

[1Way]

I did some research and it appears to be fairly simple to disable the parts of MCE that cause problems with Presonus.

How do you do it? I'll go google it if I can't find how to do it here.

I have a laptop that I may not keep so I do not want to format and load a new os, plus buying another version of xp when you already have one, seems a waist of money, especially if you can just tweak it to get it to work.

 

[TIKIROCKER]

G'day all,

I recently went with a computer upgrade, running a Pentium 4 with XP Home Edition and I bought the Presonus Inspire after much consideration of other brands including the Firebox. I'm pretty old school, having only just moved from outboard hard disk recorder - Roland VS880EX - and in the old days using a Tascam Porta 1 that I still own. I'm seriously into analogue and digital stomp boxes and admit to knob twiddler's addiction. One might have thunk that someone like me would steer away from the Presonus Inspire but I tell you what; I LOVE the interface and the soft control system - it's extremely tidy and instantaneous with the mouse to get the job done.

As for sound - I'm VERY happy indeed - I have recorded vocals, guitars, drums and bass in basic demo's this last week and the quality of this interface is superb! Zero latency at all and smooth sailing with the Inspire. Now I may well upgrade later on in the piece but for now this little interface offers me huge bang for buck and great quality. It should be noted that there was an agenda with the inputs for the Inspire also - that it was intended to be used in conjunction with OTHER Inspires and hooked together - the supposition being that other band mates would buy them and integrated these when recording.

The lack of MIDI was a consideration but I can easily pick up a USB Midi interface if and when I want one. The portability is very cool and it runs off Firewire power straight from the computer on a 6 pin Firewire cable. A nice touch is being able to just sit the Inspire on top of my CD tower and run the whole device from my desktop ... this totally streamlines my work flow and cuts down on clutter in my studio workspace. The soft interface is something I have quickly come to appreciate and I can vouch for it's operational effectiveness. Finally I was very pleased to find that this little box has a steel chassis surrounded by hard plastic sides ... I haven't dropped it as yet but it is supposed to be drop proof and I'd believe it.

Thumbs up on the inspire from this fella.

 

[billoetjen]

Inspire bass trouble

Hi,

I just started using an Inspire (Newbie) to record my Blues trio (mic'd voice, acoustic guit w/pup, and electric bass). My rig - vox, guit into Yamaha powered mixer, then rec. out to ch. 3,4 (RCA, unbalanced) of the Inspire. Bass straight into the inspire ch 1. Garageband on Mac G3 Pismo PB upgraded to 550 MHz G4 and fast HD.
Everything sounds clean and clear except the bass which clips (overdrives?) on the bottom string even at very low in levels.

Anyone else have this problem with the Inspire?
Does the Inspire lack headroom in that area?
Would switching to Firebox make a difference?

Thanks to everyone in advance.

Bill

 

[Bulls Hit]

It shouldn't do that Bill. Is it clipping in the inspire control panel, before it gets to your sequencer? Have you tried using the limiter switch?

 

[fatstrat]

Late reply, but I just want to chime in and say I'm very pleased with my Presonus Inspire. It has two 1/4" or XLR inputs (one or the other) and two RCA inputs. I run my guitar/bass directly into the box using the 1/4" input, or run straight in with my mics. I run my desktop mixer into the RCA inputs so I can utilize them as mic inputs, etc...

As far as clipping problems with a bass, do you have active pickups? I know I have to turn down the volume on my bass to prevent clipping. Not sure if you've done this already, I just know some people run balls-out with thier instrument volume and the Inspire doesn't seem to like that much.