MusicRadar

• Review

The PreSonus StudioLive series of mixers has been delivering serious high quality digital audio features at a great price for a few years now. Now these live mixer/DSP/soundcard combos have an entry-level baby brother.

It may have a few less knobs on the channels, less I/O, and no subgroups, but does have the addition of MIDI control and I/O, unlike its larger siblings, meaning that its power, quality, and features are hard to ignore.

A digital mixer with iPad wireless control, a built-in 16 in and out audio interface, and enough effects and processing to look after the needs of many a gig or studio session is seriously cool. To do it at this price is seriously impressive. Let's get stuck in.

Heavy set

"All the features sounded and felt exactly as we'd have hoped, perhaps exceeding our fairly high expectations of them."

Out of the box, its small footprint of less than two square feet feels fairly heavy. Everything feels very solid - the faders do have a tiny amount of lateral play, but are better than most of this size.

Booting up has to be quick, which it is. In reality, digital mixers crash sometimes and need resetting, even ones costing house prices.

The 16.0.2's six seconds is great. You'll increase reliability by using an uninterruptible power supply, which we highly recommend with any digital device that you expect to rely on, especially at a gig.

Testing the drivers on Windows 7 was painless. The drivers currently have a public beta 1.5.1 version available, which does not yet support Windows XP - the final one will.

Despite the efforts of PreSonus Tech support, we were unable to get it to work with a trusty old XP laptop using the 1.5.0 driver. In all fairness to PreSonus, Microsoft have done a terrible job with FireWire drivers in XP, and this has simply proved that it's time to give up on XP and switch to Win 7.

Fat of the channels

The Fat Channel functions are what give this little piece of kit a big-console feel - and sound. It's exciting to find so much control in something with such a small footprint.

The variable high-pass filter has great range, and to have it on a board of this size makes it feel much bigger than it is!

We were also very impressed at the sound of the EQ. The highs are crisp and also delicate, the lows deep and defined, without massive amounts of audible phase-shift, like many analogue mixers this size.

We tried sweeping the mid frequency very quickly. Not only did it feel very fast and responsive, but we heard no sign of jitters or aliasing.

All the features sounded and felt exactly as we'd have hoped, perhaps exceeding our fairly high expectations of them.

The features and controls are very easy to look at and use, with LED bar graphs giving clear visual feedback as to what is happening. The copy and paste of Fat Channel settings from one channel to another is really quick and simple.

The only downside we could find is a lack of gain reduction metering, at the same time as adjusting the threshold and other features of the compressor.

With the metering set to Gain Reduction, as soon as you finish moving any pots, the meters do instantly show the reduction. A minor point, but we missed it.