Recording Studio Equipment

I like it, I’d take it everywhere I go. The cool thing about this mixer is it has phantom power built in, small enough to store or place any where. I like it a lot.

I baught purchased this mixer years ago from Guitar Center to record my band. It did a really good job. For the price and quality, it’s just good!

I do voice overs for my clients’ multimedia presentations and have used an older model MobilePre from M-Audio. This device kicks butt and does a much better job and takes up even less space in my bag. I love this thing and highly recommend it for what I do. I use it primarily with Adobe Sound Booth and its is fantastic.

Hi all–
I’d spent some time surfing around for a highly portable two channel USB microphone adapter to hook up to my laptop and record my band’s rehearsals. I quickly arrived at a preference to get one of the marker pen-shaped interfaces that you can plug your mic into eliminating the need for a mic cable. Out of the obvious suspects on the market the specifications seemed to indicate the MPP offers audio quality superior to the other units so I decided to give it a shot plus I wanted to record stereo so I purchased 2 units.
My initial portability demands had been met – I can fit two NT55s incl. stand adapters and the extra capsules, two USB cables (supplied with MPP), and the two MPPs in one standard size mic pouch and put the whole thing into my gig bag’s front pocket (I’m a guitar player) – I’m pretty sure this would have been impossible in the 2008 world and it feels fantastic!
The units look fairly sturdy. I guess the XLR could be better quality. The circuit board is lodged in the metal body very tight to avoid any parts rumbling inside (read on to see why I had to open the unit up). Knobs are made of rubber, have a soft feel to them and again fit very nicely. The phantom power switch is a low action micro switch that is kind of difficult to get to, which I class as a good thing as long as you don’t deactivate it while trying to insert headphones in the 3.5mm stereo jack that’s just next to it.
Sound quality indeed turned out to be this product’s strength. Noise level of both recording and playback is very low, I had no problem with any kind of distortion, hum, hiss… Obviously it’s always a question of what is it that you’re comparing it to. As far as the built-in sound adapter in most/all laptops I can’t even begin to describe the difference. I’m sure there are better laptops in that respect than my Compaq but seriously it would be comparing two different worlds.
Reliability – on the first session I noticed that the first unit I tried kept losing signal from the mic while recording. This was magnified when I was moving the mic around and indicated a connection issue between the mic and the MPP. Initially I thought it would be loose XLR contacts on the MPP. Now, live too far and I’m too impatient to send the unit back so being fairly skilled and being an electrical guy I went through the hassle of taking the XLR apart to respring the contacts to later find out the exercise didn’t fix the problem. You can imagine the internal PCB is a pretty busy one so I still hoped the lost/unstable connection would be between the small board that the XLR is soldered to and the unit’s main board – and it was – I quickly found the main board kept losing connection to pin 3 of the XLR. As the internal electronics uses multi layer circuit boards I was unable to track where the path goes and where it’s broken so I just ran a piece of fine wire from the XLR to the main board on which it was obvious enough where it needs to go. No problem from there. The other unit was OK.
Next thing was to try both MPPs at the same time to record a stereo track. The Centrance website does make sure their users understand they need to plug both units into the same USB hub to achieve a sample-accurate stereo track so that’s what I did (my laptop has two USB ports on either side and I plugged both in one side). In Cool Edit I assigned the inputs to the tracks and pressed rec. After a second or two of the cursor still stuck in one spot a Win error message pops up saying I’m exceeding the USB’s bandwidth. This was in a 44.1kHz and 16bit recording session. Out of curiosity, I replugged one unit to one of the USB ports on other side of my laptop reassigned inputs and tried again. This time the recording started successfully and carried on with no apparent problem. After it was done I listened to the tracks and confirmed what Centrance warned about. The two tracks were off from beat one and their offset was getting worse as the track progressed to reach over one second over two and a half minutes. I later even tried to adjust sample rate of one of the tracks to compensate and realized the two clocks were not only different but were very unstable during the course of the track too. So again, Centrance is right, no way to go!
I’m currently trying different setups to make the units work in stereo, if I don’t I’ll be stuck with two MicPortPros both of them for sale as one is obviously not going to give me stereo. I paid $300 for the two units and was ready to take off three stars in this review but I just noticed here that the price has recently dropped to something a lot more reasonable so I’m only taking two stars off.
All in all, mono operation is flawless as long as your MPP isn’t faulty and sound quality is stunning for what it is. Much worth considering especially now at the new price.

You can tell right away when pulling this out of the box that it will be high quality. I plugged it in, had it set up in minutes, and the sound quality it produces between my AT2020 condenser and Audigy 2 ZS is superb. I can’t tell a huge difference when cranking the Drive up, but I suppose you would have to upgrade the tube to really get that.

The Presonus Tube Pre is compact, but don’t let that fool you! It’s sound is very big, and very clean! I use it in tandem with the MXL V67i mic for extra vocal warmth. I did some research and found that you can change the tube for even greater sound! Don’t waste your money on the cheaper ones, this is a sure bet!

It works pretty well for my compressor mics, but if you’re looking for a nice DI box for your guitar, fuggedaboudit! The 20dB pad boosts the noise floor up way too high. Maybe it’s the stock tube. Maybe it’s the circuitry. Maybe it’s just my unit. All I know is that this thing can be very noisy. But for the price, it’s a pretty good deal.

A great tool for low budget home recording. I mic every track to Audacity. I use a low budget dynamic mic and the Icicle gives the right boost for PC recording. I keep the gain at 90 to 100 percent and do volume control on the PC.
I see some complaints out there about durability. Keep in mind it is a piece of computer hardware like a modem or an external hard drive, NOT something that you would use onstage or throw into a gig bag. Another plus is no drivers or setup. That’s important to me when I get home from work and want to record a tune. Just plug it in and go!