Presonus Quantum 2626

My intention getting the Persons Quantum 2626 was to replace an (excellent) USB desktop device with a Thunderbolt rack-mounted device, for neatness and good sound quality.

The good:
- Awesome sound, sample rates and (audio) latency specs are through the roof.
- Good quality device, connectors and knobs have a reliable feel to them and look neat.
- Split Phantom power for simultaneous use of condensers and ribbons, pre-amp controls, 2 head set jacks, enough inputs, etc ... all great!
- Universal Control software gives nice insights in what you're recording and looks awesome.

The bad:
- The gripe several reviewers are having is real: it doesn't automatically route the inputs to the outputs and the UC software doesn't let you. Just playing something to your mic for fun without the intention to record won't produce any sound, you NEED to enable your DAW and create appropriate tracks. Quickly worked around with a Logic template and you get used to it, but the first days i had to fiddle and refiddle and refiddle (and i don't mean with the violin).
- It's a rack mounted device, but it has some pretty annoying design choices. The on/off button is on the back, so very hard to reach.
- Also, there are no jack inputs on the back. So, when mounted together with my synth, i can't use some short patch cables to make neat mess-free audio connections. Instead i have cables going from the back of my rack around to the front to reach the jack inputs on the Quantum. Hmmm.
- For some reason, the MIDI ports are just bad. Laggy, irregular events, dropped events, note-on without note-off, etc ... Felt entirely unusable to me. It COULD be a setting somewhere, but the UC software has as good as no settings, and i couldn't find anything in Logic (also, why would a thunderbolt device need to make compromises on transfer speeds?). My Quantum replaced a Fortrite device which worked perfectly MIDI-wise with my exact same setup. I ended up buying a rack mounted dedicated MIDI device and that again works perfectly, same cables, settings, same everything.

So, in conclusion: i bought this device so i could put sample rates and buffer sizes on MAX without worry, get the cable mess off my desktop, and finally use that cool T3 port on my iMac, and it delivers. It looks nice and i'll keep it for sure. But ... it's clumsy to rack-mount, and the MIDI connectors are somehow useless.

Bought this unit to pair with new pc build that makes use of the thunderbolt 3 protocol. This unit seems to be one of the few thunderbolt 3 interfaces available with this amount of I/O, most others seen to have fewer built in mic pres and are considerably more expensive. For what I wanted to achieve this unit fits the bill nicely ( recording band practice and other small mixing projects).

Construction.

Seems to be reasonably well constructed and quite small for the amount of I/O compared to my last interface, the focusrite pro 40, it's quite small which is great for mobile recording. If I had to be critical I would have liked my power button on the front.

Sound

I've had the chance record a full band and I'm quite pleased with the sound especially for this price range. Overall it's quite a clean sounding interface but not harsh, sounds great on drums, guitars and vox. Does good job of capturing transients and has a nice rounded character.

Included software The included studio one Artist 4 has gave me a few errors (graphics related) and also corrupted projects. I've also got some cracks and pops on a reasonably high spec computer (gigabyte designare motherboard, 16gb ram, i5 9600k, 1tb NVME SSD) and had to move up to 256 samples latency but this is with alot of tracks 100 + as I was mixing 10/12 songs in one project at 20 percent CPU usage. So not sure if it's Studio one or the PC. Other than that I like the functionality (coming from logic) and generally it's getting the job done. Currently deciding whether to upgrade to pro version. I was a little disappointed that some of the included 3rd party plugin/software requires an ilok but sadly that seems to be the way the industry is moving.

Overall

This is a nice little Interface with alot of I/O expandability. I was able to hook up my old Interface (pro 40 flashed to standalone mode) as an 8 channel adat preamp bank for 16 channels.

Just a warning to anyone buying this, if you plan to run on older MacBook pros/apple machines with thunderbolt 2 make sure to buy the apple thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter as other brands do not work both ways as I learnt trying to sync this up to my old 2013 retina MacBook Pro.

After searching for the fastest audio interface I ordered presonus quantum 2626. I am not disappointed! It works really well with my MacBook Pro 2015 (with bidirectional Apple thunderbolt adapter). If I practice my keyboard with Garritan CFX or Keyscape in standalone mode I can set buffer size to 32 samples with very rare glitches. It works well with Cubase (I use buffer size 128 samples). Recommend!

If you have a modern pc with Thunderbolt 4 or even 3 there is nothing even close to this when it comes to low latency.
Thunderbolt 4/3 is really something different, and can NOT be likened to usb 2 or even 3.
The protocol to how Thunderbolt handles sound and the sheer bandwidth is something that is almost unheard of in the pc world.

I have a Slate Digital VRS8 that I have used up until I got this and driver and latency/performance wise the Quantum 26/26 leaves the VRS8 in the dust.

The Slate VRS8 was a 2000 Eur audio interface (now discontinued) The PreSonus Quantum is a 630 Eur audio interface.

The hardware in the Slate is better, but I don't care. The sheer speed of the Quantum 2626 wins hands down.

A couple of negative things about the Quantum 2626:
The instrument hi-z inputs are not good. Granted I come from high quality mos-fet DI's of the VRS8, but this was bad.
Advice: buy an external DI box like the Warm Audio active DI to take care of this.
If you do this, the DI solution is even better than the VRS8 at a cheaper price total.
The mic pres are all you want them to be (for me at least): Large headroom, lots of gain and QUIET.

It is an extremely simple interface, but there is a reason for this: the extremely low asio roundtrip time.
You simply do not need a software mixer for the interface with eq compressor and such when you can do it inside Cubase etc at close to no latency.

Apart from the bad, yes I will say bad hi-z guitar inputs this one heck of an audiointerface. The drivers are extremely well written.
If you are a guitarist with a pc studio like me, buy this and an uber-quality active DI box to get your guitar into the computer.
The DI is extra money yes.. but the total money will still be a lot less than audio interfaces still doing usb 3 or usb 2.

It's a nobrainer.

Yes I will heartily recommend the Quantum 2626