Presonus Sucks

It goes without saying that DAWS suck and so do a lot of  hardware software interfaces. The shit from Presonus is no exception. Let it suffice to say that the best and the brightest geeks are not designing digital recording software but beyond that most of these companies' business practices are less than ethical. The following review that was sent to me from Amazon illustrates clearly illustrates this. I am not saying that all Presonus products are all this horrible but I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone do business with them due to there poor business ethics and terrible customer service.  

The Presonus user who pointed me to this review also sent me the photo that appears on the Presonus "support" forum.  Sometimes satire just writes itself and if a picture is worth a thousand words then some of those words this picture conveys are: "Fucking piece of shit!" "This sucks!"  "Why did I buy this shit?!"  "I actually paid for this shitware!"  "These bugs are costing us a fortune!" "Fuck this shit!"

This review is from: Presonus AudioBox 44VSL 24-Bit/96 kHz 4x4 USB 2.0 Audio Interface (Personal Computers)

I bought a 44VSL, I am sorry I did. I called around trying to find something to suit my needs:
1. I/O


2. I am a musician, not a recording engineer. (I didn't want to sit in front of a computer, for 6 hours trying to get it to work, and maybe 5 minutes of actual recording)

3. Mobility ( Set Up at one of the other band member's houses )

4. Great customer service/ Tech support (Good would have been fine)

5. Compatible software for programmable drum beats and sounds for electronic drums for recording.

I was using a table top and a drum machine, not so good. The PreSonus dealer I spoke to said this box and software had everything I need and will work fine with my computer... So I shell out the money for this thing. It crashed soooo many times the first day. Then he tells me, oh if you had the upgrade, ($299) you won't have these problems...what ever. I should have known when he told me that someone had just returned one of these cause he couldn't get it to work and that it was the "only" computer that this happened to. Well the same thing happened to mine, it didn't work at all like I was told it would. Then all he could do is blame my computer and hardware and told me that I would have to do almost $2k worth of upgrades to get it to work, AFTER HE TOLD ME THAT WHAT I HAD WAS FINE AND IT WAS TOTALLY WHAT I NEEDED.

Finally, the last thing he told me was that I would have to set up my laptop, never turn it off, never move it, and only use an external hard drive, that I can NEVER unplug or use any other USB port, otherwise all the databases get fouled and the program can find nothing and only opens up with a shell of what is supposed to be there. I can only use this thing as a scratch pad with a click track. No drum machine works without crashing it, hell even without the drum machine it would crash 2 minutes into recording a track, with ONE track on the whole file with distortion, THAT'S IT!! The fact that I would have to leave it on, plugged in and cannot move it TOTALLY NEGATES BEING MOBILE!!!! So I call him up and try for over 2 months to get this worked out, (meanwhile I'm chomping at the bit with new songs and am about to pull my hair out sitting here for hours trying to figure this program out) but I can never get past just recording a simple guitar track without it crapping out. I was told " you'll be recording within minutes....it's been roughly 20,160 and have yet to complete a single song, I have met this guy places for him to work on it, he has come to my house.

THIS CRAP DOES NOT WORK LIKE IT SAYS...oh and he told me that this was " so simple you don't need to be a recording engineer..." what the fat frog's hair ever! Finally, I am sick of all the " maybe it's this, maybe that, hold on let me call an engineer at PreSonus, this shouldn't be happening..." "give me a couple of days to figure it out...", nothing, I call, still nothing. So I tell him, "Fine, I feel mislead and ripped off how do return this thing" guess what, you only have 30 days... " hey go to this place, they'll give a great price" place says, " we don't take those, they are too problematic" great, so now I am stuck, out several hundreds of dollars, haven't been able to record one single song to completion and now I have to find a buyer for this CRAP myself and will probably not get anywhere close to what I paid for it! Congratulations sir on your "awesome" review. I doesn't mean a darn thing if your product doesn't even do what free programs will do...record a song. And yes I have tried calling for a week now, I've tried every single option to talk to someone not a single answer. So much for "Excellent tech support", non-existent here. Disappointed, frustrated, and wishing I never bought this product!! STAY AWAY!!!

Here are some more reviews:

Worst Purchase Ever
Could not get rid of pops and crackling after weeks of trying everything possible. Tried it on 4 different computer systems, mac and pc. No official drivers for OSX Mountain Lion (which has been out for over a year now as I write). Employees at Guitar Center knew it was junk but sold it to me anyway. Went back to the store and they said 'oh yeah, a lot of people have...

Read the full review ›

What a piece of junk..., June 2, 2012

I bought this interface because it was USB 2.0 compatible, had MIDI interfaces, and 4 mic inputs with 48V phantom for all. I am an electrical engineer. Right from the start I felt like I was an engineer testing this and sending it back for a re-design. This thing never works the same way twice. I always have to spend a half day to set this up. I used a dual-core Intel notebook with 4BG Ram with Sonar X DAW. I had the same problems when using Avid's ProTools LE. The quality of the sound was CD quality at best and I could never get the 96kHZ 24 bit mode working. And if you want to monitor the recording with effects, I have only been able to do it with their bundled software. The latency on three different DAWs was too great to be useful You'd think they would have tested this on all of the popular DAWs. Stay away from this one.

Final Verdict, I returned this product.

This product is a total nitemare. I bought it cuz I though it offered features better than my four year old Firebox. I had zero problems with the Firebox other than the spdif never worked but I got around that.
The only thing that worked properly on this box was the headphones. The Main Outs were distorted. I had to pump full levels on my board just to monitor fuzzy sound.

I need professional sound. This product wasted away days of my time trying to trouble shoot everything that was wrong with it. I reached the conclusion, either not ready for prime time or defective. I have to think defective because no Pro product could be this bad.

I bought to TC Electronic impact Twin to replace this. Much better product. I'm also using Zoom, importing 25/96 wave files. I'd rather work on DWA. I bought my first ProTools in 97.

So, my experience with PreSonus and this product was nitemare. Not ready for Prime Time pro. The sad part is I made every effort to make this product work. I'm the loser of my time and good faith efforts. Let the truth be known! 

Presonus 44VSL SUX!!!

This product sucks.... it's so awful! And I'll tell you why you must never buy this crap

The sound fades away and you have to restart it to make it work again, once you restart the device it works fine again... then, the samplerate decreases a lot and it sounds like a bitcrusher, then the sound dissapears one more time... then you get angry and reconnect the power cable and you get sound again...

Then you update it to new drivers/firmware and you probably will think this will solve the problem with the audio... it requires to restart your system. Ok, let's open the DAW to make some music... The presonus 44vst seems to work fine...

...aaaaaaand it's gone :/

Don't you ever ever EVER buy this product!!! it's the most unstable audio interfase on the market D:

Miscellaneous Complaint.. 

- No matter what I tried, I could not get it to work with 96Khz audio. In fact, it only works with 44.1Khz and 256 buffer size and refuses to work with any other settings.

- Can not use any other active USB devices on a USB bus while recording - audio tracks come out with crackles. This eliminates the possibility of recording to an external disk hooked up on USB, which is limiting.

Forums say this problem goes away if you use MAC (I'm on XP-SP3 bare bones and I have no intentions of switching)

Bottom line:

- I will be returning this and looking for something else due to the above two limitations


If you want to see how horribly Presonus treats its customers check out these links: 

http://forums.presonus.com Presonus Customer Support/Abuse Forum

Presonus sends its paid trolls technical support specialists aka customer abuse specialists to other digital recording forums like this one.

Here is how the inbred trash erudite folks at Presonus treats contractors and customers who know more about their products than the Presonus fuck ups technical experts and educators do. 

ALL Their SHIT crashes!

Mac OS X: Studio One Crashing : PreSonus Audio Electronics

support.presonus.com/entries/21556199-Mac-OS-X-Studio-One-Crashing‎

Mac OS X: Studio One Crashing. Common Solutions. Studio One v2.

Constant Crashes - PreSonus Forum

forums.presonus.com › Forum Index › Studio One General Discussion‎

Jan 31, 2012 - 11 posts - ‎6 authors

I know almost nothing about Macs, but if your crashes are happening every 3 minutes, that would strongly suggest an app or process running in ...

[BUG]: Usage of Bend Markers (and melodyne) causes ...

6 posts

Nov 12, 2013

Plugin crashes Studio one.

10 posts

Oct 7, 2013

Studio One Pro unstable at 64bit (lots of crashes), but ...

3 posts

May 22, 2013

S1 crashes a lot with Mac (Mini 2.3 i7 2012)

9 posts

May 20, 2013

More results from forums.presonus.com

Why does my Studio One Crash on startup with 10.7 & 10.8 ...

support.presonus.com/.../21315174-Why-does-my-Studio-One-Crash-on...‎

Oct 18, 2012 - Why does my Studio One Crash on startup with 10.7 & 10.8? ... or Studio One will load and crash after the beginning prompt says "Hardware Integration." ... http://www.presonus.com/support/downloads/FireStudio-Project.

Why is the Universal Control crashing when I launch it? : PreSonus ...

support.presonus.com/.../119066-Why-is-the-Universal-Control-crashing...‎

Feb 25, 2010 - There is a known issue that prevents the FireStudio family driver from properly overwriting earlier versions of its files on some systems. This can ...

Studio One (v2.6) crashes while doing Timestretch - PreSonus Forum

https://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/41650.page‎

Nov 6, 2013 - 7 posts - ‎5 authors

But then every time id reopen the session and try to proceed with editing after like 3 minutes, studio one would just crash and id always get the ...

Re:Studio One crashes every time when updating a master file ...

https://forums.presonus.com/posts/list/39634.page‎

Aug 20, 2013 - 5 posts - ‎3 authors

As soon as it's finished bouncing, the whole Studio One application crashes. So for importing 7 songs into my project, it crashes 7 times.

Samplituide versus presonus Studio one - Gearslutz.com

www.gearslutz.com/.../518821-samplituide-versus-presonus-studio-one.h...‎

Aug 11, 2010 - anyone that has both, care to share comments on which they prefer? My Samplitude crashes on me alot if i push it too hard (alot of tracks, ...

Peavey Forums • View topic - Revalver crashing Presonus Studio One

forums.peavey.com:8080/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=33109‎

Oct 5, 2013 - 2 posts - ‎2 authors

Revalver MKIIIdotV (latest version 2011!) is crashing Presonus Studio One 2.6 64 bit, Windows 7 64 bit i7 3.50GHz 32gb ram. This starts out as ...

Presonus Firepod vs SONAR 6? Crash | Cakewalk Forums

forum.cakewalk.com/Presonus-Firepod-vs-SONAR-6-Crash-m1056997....‎

16 posts

Any one had problem? I call tech, he recomend use ASIOS mode.and update Firepod.... I got drop out so many time? Crash.....any idea....?????

PRESONUS 24.4.2 crashed, wont see inputs - ProSoundWeb Community

forums.prosoundweb.com › ... › LAB: The Classic Live Audio Board‎

Mar 28, 2013 - 10 posts - ‎6 authors

Im working a show overseeing audio in breakout room(s) for a convention and had a PRESONUS 24.4.2 stop passing audio. The scenario: ...