PreSonus Quantum 2626, 26x26, Thunderbolt 3, Low Latency audio interface with software bundle including Studio One Artist, Ableton Live Lite DAW and more for recording, streaming and podcasting

Product Information

Thunderbolt 2 = 20 Gb/s (or four times more potent than USB 3.0 - Do the bandwidth capability numbers - 240 X 4 = 960 channels - - Even a "serial" recording engineer couldn't do this - Zero chance -

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). Uninstall universal control and remove the quantum as an allowed device in your thunderbolt settings. According to PreSonus, the unit has the “lowest round-trip latency of any audio interface available.” They say it can be under 1ms round-trip, depending on your setup. That seems right in the ballpark based on the performance I was getting. I don’t have the statistics available to compare it to other Thunderbolt 3 interfaces, but I can say unequivocally that it’s the fastest interface I’ve ever used. Removal of some features that drop the price is common and standard practice for products. Thunderbolt tech is not cheap to develop and it is hard to meet these price points. I've already outlined the differences in the products so I'm not going over it again. I have been troubleshooting this during the day and just wound up with an answer. I hope this helps. For starters I am using a dell XPS 15 9570 so hopefully this helps for macas well. Here was my process (for every restart I did I selected the "shut down" option and then switched on the computer):The software by PreSonus (Studio One) has an easy interface and a highly intuitive control system. This DAW's clever native low-latency monitoring system will ensure that a small buffer setting is applied to the live inputs to avoid dropouts or latency. The 1RU unit sports eight front-panel XLR-1/4-inch combo inputs. Channels 1 and 2 support mic or Hi-Z sources, and channels 3-8 are for mic- or line-level sources. You don’t see that many interfaces with eight inputs on the front. Particularly for home setups without patch bays, it’s a convenient design.

OK I think there is no point in looking at thunderbolt 3 @ 40 Gb/s (giga-bits-per-second) which is X2 of what thunderbolt 2 can do.

Apple Silicon compatibility—standard.

The absence of a routing matrix, DSP mixer, built-in effects and so on make using the Quantum 2626 refreshingly simple. You select your sample rate, open your DAW of choice, set your buffer size (I used the lowest option of 32 samples), and you're set. Everything behaved exactly as expected, with the one exception being that the headphone outs never quite went fully off; even at 'zero' there was still a very low-level signal. In terms of sound quality, though, there was nothing to fault. Indeed, the noise and distortion specs appear completely unchanged across the board compared with the original Quantum, and they are certainly more than good enough to not impose themselves. All types of signal I tried it with — mic, line and instrument — were handled perfectly well. I tend to really dig in when I'm playing bass, for example, and can easily overload lesser instrument inputs and DI boxes, but that wasn't the case here. I even had to turn the gain up a bit on the 2626, which made a nice change from having to turn my bass down or find a device with a pad to put between me and the input. Since using the 2626, I've actually come to enjoy using my DAW more. Also, the device only has one Thunderbolt port. This makes it very challenging to benefit from the Quantum 2626's ability to be daisy-chained especially if you have a Pc or Mac with only one or two Thunderbolt-compatible ports.