A Loop House Review of
Presonus Eureka
 The presonus Eureka is
quickly getting a reputation of being a quality class A preamp for a
great price. I have owned this preamp for about 3 years now and looking back I think it was one of the best $600.00 I have spent when it come to recording gear. I like many home recording junkies really got on the "tube" preamp bandwagon purchasing the ART MPA Gold , a Bellari RP533 , and even a apex 450 tube mic. All the previous mentioned products serve well in the right application but I noticed my recordings starting to sound like an old monkey's album. Thats when I decided to begin my search for a well priced solid state preamp. I was surprised that most non-tube preamps were actually more than tube pre's, but their was some nice ones by Grace and Focusrite but for the value of it I decided on the Presonus Eureka. The Presonus Eureka is much more than just a pre amp it is a whole channel strip. It has the class A pre, a compressor and a equalizer all built in the small single rack space. I feel it may have been a little better to construct it in a 2 rack space box, but others may like the movability of it. The preamp sounds amazing, quite as a mouse yet has tons of gain. I have now learned that a solid state pre is really vital in ones studio and I have used this one with great results on vocals, and guitar as well as bass. The compressor is also really nice and probably worth the price of the whole strip. It has an equalizer that sounds good but is a little hard to set up if you are not familiar parametric eq's (I start with the presets written in the manual and go from there). It has a nice impedance range and also a "tube saturation" dial that is suppose to make it sound more warm (I don't usually bother with it, I don't find it adds anything worthwhile to the sound). If you are looking for a good channel strip to be the front end of your DAW than I highly recommend the Presonus Eureka. I think it compares to much more expensive gear. |
| Here is some information about the Presonus
Eureka form the Presonus website." The EUREKA Pro Recording Channel The Eureka's ultra fast compressor has both soft and hard knee compression as well as a separate make up gain stage and hi-pass side chain compression to deliver hard pumping to ultra transparent compression and everything in between. The Eureka's three-band fully parametric EQ gives you variable Q (bandwidth) on each band as well as an EQ pre COMP switch to put the EQ before the Compressor in the signal path. The equalizer has overlapping frequency selection on each band for total tonal control and shaping. The Eureka is loaded with microphone, line and instrument input so you can use it as a front end preamplifier for recording with microphones, guitars, keyboards, synths as well as a compressor/equalizer on a single channel during mixdown. The Eureka also has balanced send and return jacks so that you can insert your favorite outboard processor before the compressor/EQ to further enhance and customize your sound. An optional 24 Bit/192kHz digital output card (AD192) is available for the Eureka to further optimize sonic performance. The Eureka's AD192 digital output card is loaded with both SPDIF and AES/EBU outputs, word clock I/O as well as a balanced TRS line input so that only one output card is necessary when using two Eureka's in stereo or dual mono situations." So there you have it. Here are the pros and cons according to me. Pros: Affordable Cons: I rate it 4.5 out of 5 Street price $499.99 (may 2008) (This review was conducted by Cory Broersma, owner of www.theloophouse.com and an avid home recording junkie.) Back to reviews page |
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