Description
Record and monitor through your favorite plug-ins inside your DAW with the blazing fast speed only Quantum interfaces can deliver. The Quantum 2626 takes advantage of the jaw-dropping speed of Thunderbolt 3 to achieve a barely-measurable round-trip latency of less than 1 ms. Superb high-definition digital conversion and eight ultra-transparent analog XMAX mic preamps ensure your audio always sounds its best. Insert your favorite outboard gear with two direct preamp outputs and dedicated line-level returns. Expand your system up to 26 simultaneous inputs and outputs using ADAT Optical. Streamline your recording process and make better music, faster with the Quantum 2626.
Sean –
Great audio interface with a few unusual quirks
This is above all a great sounding interface. I recently moved to this platform from an old Focusrite Saffore Pro 40 Firewire. I still have that interface in my studio so I was able to A/B compare it with the Quantum 2626 Thunderbolt 3 interface.The difference in sound quality is immediately apparent. The best and most detailed comparison I could make between the two was by listening to the same audio tracks played on both interfaces through a pair of Sony Z1R headphones. The dynamics and overall clarity of the Q 2626 is far superior to the Pro 40. It’s a major upgrade. Perhaps that is to be expected due to the difference in age between the two platforms but I was always happy with the sound of the Pro 40, until I heard the Q 2626.I’d like to point out (as other reviewers have) what is perhaps thr biggest flaw in this unit, the lack of any hardware monitoring for any of the audio inputs. That omission has been fairly criticized but it’s not a dead end to your workflow that some other reviewers have implied. If you plug anything into the XLR/TRS inputs on the Q 2626 you WILL NOT hear it through the headphone jacks or the main outputs without doing more setup. This is not what most people are used to with their audio interfaces and I’d never encountered it in over 20 uears of audio production using many different audio interfaces in that time. In order to hear your microphone, guitar, keyboard or whatever you have plugged in to the Q 2626 you need to open your DAW software of choice and route the audio signal through there first. For example you plug your mic or instrument into the front panel of the Q 2626, then open a new project your DAW program of choice. I will use Cakewalk by Bandlab for example as it’s a well known and free DAW but the steps will be roughly the same for any DAW like Reaper, Studio One, Pro Tools, etc.Open a new project in your DAW software and select or insert an empty audio track, then press the button on the track that will enable Live Monitoring. In Cakewalk that would be the “input echo” button right next to the Record Arm button on the audio track. Once you do that you should immediately hear the audio from whatever you have plugged into the Q2626. If not then make sure you have the input on your audio track in your DAW set receive audio from the Q 2626 input where your mic or instrument is plugged in (Cakewalk has a drop down menu on the track to select this) and make sure the output on the same audio track is set to the Master Out for your mix, AND that your Master bus is set to output to the Q 2626.It’s easy for any experienced audio engineer or hobbyist, and while it may be work for a beginner, once you get a track template set up and saved you just need to reload it each time you need to monitor or record and you’re all set.That being said I do not prefer this implementation and would have liked Presonus to include a hardware mixer built in. I can only hope it was a worthwhile trade off from a design and engineering perspective and not some plan to get users hooked on subscription based audio production software from Presonus or to buy one of their outboard hardware mixers.. Even cheap $50 audio interfaces have hardware monitoring and have forever, but maybe a quality hardware monitoring implementation would have been too expensive? I’m stretching to give Presonus the benefit of the doubt here. There is an idea that because this is a Thunderbolt 3 interface that latency is a non factor, but there is always monitoring latency, and it will become worse if you are recording in a project with 100-200+ audio tracks and running dozens of plug in effects forcing you to increase the buffer size and adding more latency to live monitoring. Most people don’t have such needs though, and others who do cam get around it by upgrading their computer hardware to be more powerful if necessary.That being said what matters in the end to me is the quality of the audio this thing can produce. I don’t think you can do better for the money. It’s much better than I was expecting as having heard other Presonus interfaces in the past I was not impressed, but this unit is different and exceeded my expectations for audio quality by quite a lot.The preamps are full bodied and quiet even when turned all the way up. They also deliver great dynamics (to my ears) and the DI for guitar & bass excels in my opinion. It passes a very full, dynamic and clean DI signal that amp sims should love. It sounds great with Neural DSP Architype plug ins for example, partly because of the quality of the input from the Q 2626 preamp (use a good quality guitar cable too).Vocally the preamps also sound great to me, although there is likely better out there if you want to spend a lot more. These will be more than enough for most people if they have a decent mic to plug in.Another point I want to make is about the power plug on the back of the Q 2626. Yes it’s a small plug similar to one you’d see on an external hard drive or laptop computer, but what’s not readily apparent is that it’s a twist-to-lock plug. You have to insert it and give it a press-twist to lock it in place. Once that’s done the plug will not wobble and will stay in place much more securely.The power button on the back of the unit was a design mistake. It’s rack mount so most people can forget about being able to use it once the interface is racked. You’d have to leave it on 24/7 or rig it through a power strip or similar that has it’s own on/off switch. If it’s sitting on your desktop it’s less of a problem, or you can rack it on the bottom and leave an open space to get your hand behind it. The unit is not very deep, only about 6 inches so it’s not too bad if you have to do this.Build quality is solid. The unit jas a good weight to it and the volume knobs have a nice resistance to them, they don’t feel like cheap loose spinners.As for Thunderbolt 3 just make sure you are set up correctly if it’s not a native feature of your computer. In my case I run Windows 10 x64 on an AMD CPU platform that I built. My motherboard (Gigabyte) has a Thunderbolt header on it and I’m using Gigabyte’s Titan Ridge 2.0 Thunderbolt 3 PCI card. In my case I had to make sure I was using the correct PCI slot (the PCI x4 slot, usually located as the bottom slot on newer motherboards) and had to make sure the thunderbolt header on the motherboard was plugged into the Titan Ridge card and that both power cables were plugged into the back of the Titan Ridge card. You may also need a BIOS update to unlock thunderbolt fucntionality depending on the age of your BIOS. If you are an Intel or Mac user and your system came with native thunderbolt support you won’t have to worry about any of this, which is great.Assuming you have your thunderbolt connection properly set up you should get very good speed from this interface. If you are a windows user there are things you can do to further improve performance and reduce latency like turning off HPET, disabling C-States, setting power modes to max performance, and more you can look up elsewhere.I should mention that you WILL hear audio from your PC right out of the box when you plug the Q2626 in, so unlike jumping through hoops with live hardware monitoring, you can plug in to your conputer and hear audio from websites or games or MP3/FLAC players, or anything else. Quality is great too.Overall I feel this is a good unit for the money that should last many years. If you can deal with a few quirks then I think you’ll find it worth your while as the quality of the audio makes up for any other shortcomings.
Rodger –
Connection Issues + MIDI Dropout
Ive been using this for about 6 months now.I needed something with low latency and the Presonus Quantum sells itself as the lowest latency interface on market. I also wasnt super interested in UA Apollo bc i needed more in/outs for my studio than was affordable with them. The 2626 is fast if nothing else, and recording latency is imperceptable even with lots of plugins running.At first i couldnt get Windows to recognize the presonus. This is related to a Windows security feature that blacklists the unit if it attempts to connect to Windows before it has fully booted up. If this happens for you, hard reset your system and dont power up the Quantum before you log in.This wasnt a deal breaker for me, but it took some time to figure out and it is incovenient having to turn off/on my 2626 everytime i reboot my computer or switch partitions.The part i cannot forgive is the MIDI dropout that the Quantum units experience. There are lots of forum complaints about MIDI notes hanging. When i record, sometimes notes hang and wont stop playing until i stop the instrument in my daw. My cables are fine, my controller is fine, and the only new thing in my signal chain is the Presonus. I have reinstalled my drivers several times. Sometimes i successfully record MIDI, but the notes are garbled, or the midi sections are divided. Not a problem with my other DI box.There is yet to be a solution or fix from Presonus, and not for nothing, this thing was the better part of $1000.
Chris –
Get’s the Job Done for a Decent Price
Bought this interface to temporarily replace my Focusrite Clarett 8PreX while it was in the repair shop, ended up liking the monitor amp and headphone amp sections a lot more than my Clarett and it allowed me to expand to 24 inputs once I got the Clarett, so I decided to keep it. The Presonus drivers, software package, and plugins are totally worth the investment. Got some nice perks out of the deal.-1 star agree that the power supply connection terminal needs modification to something that locks in better and the thunderbolt 3 port is a little techy…
Joe –
Fait la job
Ça marche nickel sauf… je doit brancher l’alimentation de mon portable pour éviter des bruits de fond. Bruit style électrique quand la souris bouge.
Jeff –
Best audio interface ever
This is something like my 5th audio interface that I’ve owned. One of those prior ones was the Presonus FP10 which this is something of the spiritual successor to. I’ve also used the UA Apollo Twin for a couple of weeks.This is the best audio interface I’ve ever owned by far.The interface sounds clean, but the real selling feature is the low latency. I can pretty much promise you that the interface won’t be the limiting factor in your setup. I can run on 16 samples at 96khz and get sub-ms response times cleanly (as long as it’s on a very simple use case). I can monitor inputs over ASIO with absolutely no detectable latency for things like vocals, guitar, etc.The lack of live monitoring is a bit unfortunate, but that kind of goes with the idea that you don’t need live monitoring when the latency is this low. Use something like voicemeeter if you need live monitoring.Compared to the Apollo Twin, this thing absolutely dominates. The Twin didn’t give me much better performance than FireWire interfaces I’ve used (yeah you read that right).
Arthur C. Partida –
Terrible
If you can’t record with other tracks playing in real time….what’s the point? Absolutely terrible. Fire that product designer. Thunderbolt 3 completely sucks ass.The Firepods were outstanding and I built a CPU just to continue using them.
Marie Rose –
Does a few things well, but power supply is a disaster
Just to add on to the existing reviews, one con is the power supply connector – where it enters the back of the unit – was absolutely under – engineered. Presonus used a tiny little cable and wimpy connector – and it actually wobbles once it joins into the unit! Too bad! A better way to physically handle this is to leave the power supply in the unit – and just have a (physically durable) standard cable connect to the unit. Other gear in our studio was engineered to handle an internal power supply – so Presonus really have no excuse.Second note: if you are going to try and save space and physically secure the unit (don’t want it to slide around)- which so many studios are going to do – due to the low depth of the form factor – it’s only 6” deep – it’s difficult to stack other gear (or a computer) on top of it. I had to fashion an impromptu 19” rack setup, and abandoned stacking a laptop on top of it. Had it been another few inches deeper – this would have gone smoothly. Who cares if it’s depth is a few more inches?Third note – it’s absolutely unacceptable to put the on off switch in the back!Fourth note – this unit rejected a fairly new Apple sourced TB3 cable – fortunately I had a spare.
Earl Y. –
happy with presonus 2626
met my expectations. I feel there is a new level to my recordings primarily because of the lack of latency. I really noticed it when tracking digital drums. I play roland td11 through addictive drums2 into my daw which is reaper. I feel the fluidity and nuance of the drumming comes through much better. all in all very happy with it.
DC –
Using with a mac mini
Love the unit, works great in my home studio. Definitely recommend if you are looking for non usb interface.
Robert A –
BSOD for Thunderbolt 4
PreSonus says that their BSOD issue shouldn’t affect the Quantum 2626 but that does not appear to be the case. Unfortunately, the device is unusable due to the frequency of system crashes paired with a Thunderbolt 4 motherboard. The low latency capability simply isn’t worth the instability or finicky problems that it generates.