PRESONUS QUANTUM Thunderbolt Interface

As I always state when reviewing Presonus gear, I’m a bonafide fan of the company’s products. Since 1995 the company has established itself as an innovative player in the semi-pro audio recording and production arena. To be honest, Presonus kicked off with some pretty chunky audio interfaces. Initial Presonus interfaces, inevitably named ‘Fire something-or-other’, had front panels milled from blocks of aluminium. They felt like you could have thrown them down a staircase and they’d bounce back to work like Lee Majors (’80s TV reference for all you youngsters).

First generation Presonus interfaces are difficult to come across these days. While they worked, and connected to a computer with a Firewire cable, they didn’t use the standard Firewire protocol. Instead, Presonus utilised Yamaha’s luckless mLan protocol (see sidebar). mLan was clever in that it could transport audio, MIDI data, and wordclock over a single Firewire cable, but in true Yamaha fashion the driver and patching software was archaic and clunky. Like the rest of the industry, Presonus moved on to the more reliable Firewire protocol, while