To Home and Professional Studio Owners 300 JDs only BRAND NEW With Optional Remote FREE PRESONUS CENTRAL STATION pay 150 JD Now and 150 JDs Next Month Review: Add big Mixer Features and a nice D\A Converter to your Mixerless Rigby TweakMany of us have gone mixerless in the past few years. As soon as you do, youcant help but miss some of the convenience features of the mixer. We were used to having a knob to set the volume on the control room outs, and if you owned a bigger mixer you had studio outs and a talkback facility that could pipe your voice into the studio room where the performers wait for your cue. The smaller audio interfaces become even more difficult. The volume control may be buried in a menu or worse, only accessible by a control panel on the computer, where a simple slip of the mouse while wearing headphones could take you to the threshold of pain.And finally, if it does have a volume control, the audio interface has to be at a low output volume when running powered speakers, or youll blast yourself out of your chair. The d\a converters, which transform the digital numbers in the computer back to an analog signal, may be further muddied by the output electronics that are needed to attenuate the signal. The cheaper the audio interface, the more likely you will hear some distortion, or perhaps more accurately, wont hear, the transparency of your audio.Switch 3 sets of monitors in and out (A and C or B and C can be active simultaneously, but not A and B).Switch between 5 sources (2 stereo TRS, 1 Stereo Aux, Coax and Optical Stereo s/pdif. You can select any one of the five for both the Main and Cue sectionUse 2 headphones switchable between main outs and cue outputsIf you use a digital output from your audio interface to the central station, you will benefit from the central stations high quality D\A converters.Use the talkback mic to talk to the performers wearing headphones (when the phones are switched to cue)Connecting a mixdown recorder like a DAT, Cassette, MiniDisk or CDR deck.Accurately meter your inputs in 0dbVU and 0dbFs scales. The meters are fast acting and have a calibration control. 30 segments.Mute, dim and mono switchesA good sized, good feeling Volume KnobenlargeThe Central Station is easy to setup. I looked at the manual for less than 2 minutes and had no problem setting up the device. I ran outputs 1 and 2 from my MOTU 828mk2 into the TRS1 jacks and also ran the s/pdif out to the coax in on the Central station. The monitor outs were connected to mackie HR824s. Using either the analog or digital inputs the sound was a marked improvement over the 828mk2. The sound was clearer and more life-like. Switching between TRS and digital, I could compare the Presonus D\A with that of the MOTU. I detected some subtle differences. The MOTU had a heavier bass coloration that the PreSonus did not have, but I liked both, and again, both sounded better than going straight out of the 828mk2. Of course I had to wonder why that was the case.Presonus says the Central Station uses a purely passive signal path and the highest quality components
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 10:49:25 +0000
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