Presonus Firepod, Anybody usin' it? Options

[whickus]

Is anyone out there using the FirePod yet? I have a friend looking to buy a PowerBook (finally taking my advice) and I'm curious to know about anyone's good or bad experiences. I hear OS 10.3.5 has the drivers already installed...I love Apple.

[edge100]

Been using a Firepod with GarageBand since Apri, '05. Very satisfied with it. Clean, crisp recordings with a lot of depth.

One issue, if anybody out there has advice I'd appreciate it: When recording with the Firepod apparently your instrument is heard realtime along with the previously recorded playback, so that there are no latency issues. However, the same knob that controls your instrument volume also controls the intensity of your instrument signal into the computer, and if you dial back your instrument's volume it dials back the 'saturation' level of the recording.

Are there any ways around this, to keep 'saturation' optimum, while lowering instantaneous volume level on your instrument? Garageband's track volume slider seems to work only on playback, not while recording.

In a word: No.

This is a common problem for many people with the Firepod: you cannot separate the monitoring levels from the recording levels. You can only adjust the relative levels between the pre-recorded tracks (i.e. DAW output) and your inputs.

The Firepod, unlike the Firebox, does not contain a software mixer to be used for latency-free monitoring. This is, IMHO, a serious omission. All of the Firepod's direct competitors (i.e. Tascam FW series, MOTU 828mkII) have this feature in one way or another.