Rick Veneer’s View

Two great and very useful little toys – both Firewire audio interfaces and both terrific value for money.

Presonus FireStudio Project

I use the Presonus on location when I need up to eight mic preamps and it performs beautifly. Just this baby and a laptop and you have a recording studio to go. Just add mics and a pair of monitors.

Great sounding mic preamps, easy to set up. It comes with a free copy of Cubase LE and other software to complete the studio. Nothing else is needed.

Presonus FireStudio Project

MOTU Ultralite Mk 3

I use the Ultralite in my home rig. It has only two mic / instrument preamps, but there are six more line inputs and I have more mic pres available around the studio. The outstanding feature of this little box, apart from the audio quality, is the Cue Mix software. This is a great software mixer, plus really useful DSP effects for use on each channel, like 5 band parametric e.q. with 2 filters, modelled after the best classic consoles, reverb, compression and an emulation of the classic LA2A optical compressor of vintage fame. If your computer is struggling to run a lot of plugins, this outboard DSP power can be extremely useful. Even if your computer does have the grunt, it’s still great to have the option of using these very nice tools.

Motu Ultralite Mk 3

Both boxes have plenty of ins and outs, and they do their jobs extremely well. There are many other products out there, but I really only have practical experience with these two.

Well done, the gearheads at Presonus and Motu!