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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

In recent years US manufacturer PreSonus has been busy neatly shoehorning its high-quality mic preamps into an ever-shrinking series of FireWire interfaces.

The Inspire 1394 is the result of this reductionist rationale and is the company's first to be controlled entirely from within a dedicated software environment.

Accordingly, there's a complete absence of physical controls – inputs on the front, outputs on the back and that's your lot in the real world.

This takes a bit of getting used to, but at least it means that the price point for a pro-quality FireWire audio device is now £150. If you're happy using solely software control, the Inspire has much to offer.

First impressions

Out of the box you get the Inspire itself, the Control Panel CD, further CDs for the software bundle (Cubase LE 1.08, ACID XMC, Diskwelder Bronze, plug-ins from Audio Damage, Pluggo Jr/Cycling 74, Voxengo and Camel Audio, dozens of Discrete Drums loops, 100 ACID loops and 100 KeyFax Twiddly bits), along with a decent-length FireWire cable, the power supply and the warranty card.
At first glance, the Inspire doesn't look, well, very inspiring. It looks more like a network device – a sturdy chunk of aluminium surrounded on all sides by thick blue-grey plastic.

It's not as attractive as previous PreSonus products, but at least the Control Panel software – where all the attendant tweaking is done – is much better looking.

In this virtual world there are separate volume controls for inputs 1 and 2, a joint control for inputs 3 and 4 (which can be linked or separate) and one for headphone volume.

There are also buttons to switch on phantom power and the built-in limiting function for inputs 1 and 2, a Boost button to add +20dB to the preamp's level and a button to engage the phono inputs for 3 and 4.

There's also a four-track mixer, where incoming levels and panning can be set, along with master controls for playback, speaker output and global mute.

Other functions controlled via software are the sample rate, the latency, the loading and saving of mixer settings and a selection of a particular Inspire unit, as up to four Inspires can be linked to create a multi-channel set-up.

The Control Panel can also be neatly compacted to display just the core control functions and set to float on top of all other windows.

The physical inputs and outputs of the Inspire are standard fare: two XLR sockets and two instrument jacks on the front, along with a sync light to indicate whether or not the Inspire is locked to your computer's digital clock (blue is good, red is bad).

Around the back, there are two further inputs on RCA jacks and two RCA outputs for your monitors, along with a 1/8" jack for computer speakers.

Finally, there's a 1/8" headphone jack, two FireWire sockets and the jack for the (included) power supply.