Presonus Quantum 2626

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.

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

Everything abut this interface worked perfectly for me. Following the straight forward instructions, I had this up and running on a PC with Windows 10 and ProTools Studio. I didn't have any of the issues I've read about in other reviews, and the lack of latency is simply remarkable. I did need to buy my own cable which was not included. I bought one on Amazon for around 30.00, and that was all I needed fo a seemless installation. Now we're using this daily to record our new album. With a good outboard preamp and a solid large condenser mic, we are getting the perfect sound for our music.