MusicRadar

The Digimax D8 has a gain knob and pad switch for each channel.

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• Review

PreSonus has now added a fourth eight-channel mic preamp to its Digimax range, and as with all the others, it's based around Class A dual servo preamp stages.

The D8 is the new budget version that forgoes the luxuries of 88.2/96kHz digital outputs and channel inserts, as found on the next model up, the Digimax FS. This stripped down approach brings the well-received XMAX mic preamp to a lower price.

Overview

On the front the D8 presents eight gain knobs with a backlit -20dB pad switch for each. The first two channels also feature a 1/4-inch TRS (used unbalanced as a TS) for Hi-Z instrument inputs. The metering section provides four LEDs per channel (-30dB, -18dB, -6dB and 0dB) and there is a four-LED sync clock display with a button to toggle between internal and external clock synchronisation and the two sample rates (44.1kHz and 48kHz).

At the rear, there are the eight XLR balanced mic/line inputs with +48v phantom power switches between each pair. Next in line are eight 1/4-inch TRS line outputs for analogue connection, while the digital output section features a single ADAT Toslink optical socket and a BNC word clock input.

Even though this is a budget conscious unit the power is still provided via an IEC socket and not a horrid external PSU.

What's missing?

Simplicity comes at some cost to flexibility as there are some features conspicuous by their absence. There are no high-pass filters or phase flip options, which in the former case means that unwanted low frequencies will eat up some of the precious amplifier headroom.

And though providing +48v per input pair instead of per channel is fine, locating the switches to the rear makes rack mounting problematic.

Instead of the ubiquitous XLR/TRS combo sockets the D8 only uses XLR for the inputs, which is fine for mics, but some users may have to get a TRS to XLR cable for line inputs.

Our only other gripe is that the only means for external digital syncing is via word clock. Though this is not a bad way to do it, many lower price interfaces have ADAT and S/PDIF outputs. The word clock input is also not self terminating like some designs so a 75 terminator may well be another expense, though we tried it without and found no evidence of clocking problems.

In use

There are a few operational observations to note. Firstly, we found the four-LED metering to be useable but not all that informative as regularly hitting the 0dB mark could be under or over by quite a margin.

Obviously, the dynamic character of the source has a large part to play in this matter; we found that short transients that crossed the 0dB line were not creating an audible distortion so we'd still prefer the four LEDs to not having them at all.

Despite our grumble about the lack of digital clocking sources we found the D8 very quick to change sample rate when clocked externally and it made no noise when doing so – other units are far less forgiving.