Review: Presonus Audiobox iTwo
Wirelessly transferring your demos straight into your DAW is a neat trick only Presonus can do.
By Mark Davie
24 February 2015
I’ve really been getting into the spirit of it; lounging back into the studio couchback, strumming a guitar, and warbling into a Shure SM7. Tethered to the tail end of my cables has been a relatively portable two-piece setup, comprising a Presonus AudioBox iTwo interface hooked up to my iPad — it’s demo nirvana.
The real issue with demos is not finding some handy portable device to knock them out on, it’s in transforming those quick strokes of inspiration into a finely rendered production. Jumping between a portable recorder and your ‘serious’ recording system can be as messy as trying to mix watercolours with oil paints. There are some nice solutions to this predicament — Garageband and Logic speak kindly to one another, and AAF Import functions tend to bridge the gap between sessions — but Presonus’ wireless transfer of sessions between your iPad and laptop or desktop is very neat indeed.
JUMP THE GAP
But we’re jumping ahead of ourselves. Firstly, lets’s get back to the hardware; the Audiobox iTwo. By taking the bones of its already successful two-channel Audiobox range and adding an iOS connection, Presonus has doubled its flexibility.
There’s not much new here with the iTwo. Two combo, auto-sensing mic/line/instrument inputs on the front panel, with a button to switch between the latter two. Individual gain control pots give you 52dB of gain, and a single button switches on 48V phantom power for both channels. A big master volume pot controls the main stereo output on 1/4-inch TRS, and there’s a single headphone output with its own volume control too. Right in the middle of the unit is the mix control typical of small interfaces. Forget buffer settings, just dial in a comfortable balance between computer playback and input source for zero latency monitoring.
Slightly odd, but welcome, are the MIDI DIN ports on the rear. Odd, because most small two-channel interfaces don’t sport MIDI — especially not on DINs, given most devices transmit MIDI over USB now. But welcome, because the iTwo can double as a quality audio output for your iPad synths.
CAPTURE IT
Back to the software side. The key to Presonus’ little magic teleportation act is the combination of its Capture iPad app and Studio One computer DAW.
You can download Capture Duo — the two-track, 24-bit/96k-capable iPad app — for nix on the App Store. Which is neat for podcasters and simple demos. But if you want to break into more tracks, you can pay $12 to expand Capture’s 96k track count to 32, turn to the included Garageband (limited to 44.1k), or shell out for something like Auria.
Capture Duo is suitably easy to use, and well set out. The touch buttons can take a fat finger, and it automatically snaps to time or meter grids, making it useful for quick singer/songwriter-y demos or podcasts. You can trim, split and duplicate regions, easily undo or redo, set levels and pan, and create loop points for nailing that part. One nifty feature is the ability to easily change whether a track is mono or stereo without diving into menus or re-creating the track — a nice flow-over from Studio One. And there’s also a button that reveals how much recording time you have left on your iPad. There’s no effects, which is okay, but it would have been nice to see reverb and a guitar amp emulator onboard — handy inclusions for singer/songwriter-y types. There’s also no drum machine or inter-app audio capability, so if you want to build relatively fleshed out demos you’ll have to turn to another app.
But the real benefit of using Capture is that ability to wirelessly transfer your sessions straight into a copy of Presonus Studio One to polish them off. Pretty neat, and loads better than having to plug your iPad in, navigate to the app’s data in iTunes and manually save and open it.
All you need to do is make sure both devices are logged into the same wireless network, and Studio One is open on your computer. Hit the Share button on your iPad, select the computer you want to share it with and, in a jiff, the session loads up as advertised in Studio One. Once it’s in you can immediately start getting to work fleshing out that masterpiece, no cables or iTunes navigating necessary. It saves a lot of time and it’s really that easy, just make sure everything is up to date and you have the latest iOS version.
A download code for Studio One Artist is also included with the iTwo, which at $135 value is nothing to sneeze at. It’s one step above the free version of Studio One, and has most of the features of the bigger boys, including 28 native Presonus effects. Its only major drawback is the inability to use external plug-ins and Rewire in other software. But Presonus offers upgrades at decent prices if you want to move up the Studio One food chain.
NEED TO KNOW
CABLING UP
One of the Audiobox’s selling points is that it can be USB bus-powered. But unfortunately, an iPad doesn’t put out enough to drive itself and the interface. So while not having to plug in iPad power would have made this a neat mobile package, you still have to.
On the upside, the only accoutrements required for power are an extra USB cable and the charging pack that comes with your iPad — no extra powerpack to carry around.
On the downside, this configuration doesn’t fully charge your iPad while recording. Though the iTwo does pass on any leftover power, trickle charging your iPad to keep it going.
It took roughly 10 minutes of single-track recording to decrease the iPad battery by one percent. At that rate, you could record for over 16 hours straight. And recording multiple tracks didn’t seem to deplete the battery by much greater measure. It makes a great podcasting setup, especially if you already carry around an iPad anyway.
IN USE
The iTwo doesn’t sport the XMAX preamps of Presonus’ upper range, but they’re still a class A design, and have a suitable gain range for most mics and sources. There’s no pads or phase flip, but you rarely see that in this level of interfaces. The outputs are really clear, with plenty of gain on the headphone amp. The preamps are good for this level; recording bass through the DI input retained plenty of low end, and guitars were fine too. Even absolutely cranking the gain to max to record a falsetto part on the low-output SM7, there was hardly any noticeable noise — quite impressive actually.
Of course, this isn’t exclusively an iPad interface, you can use it with any computer as a handy two-channel interface too. And because it’s class-compliant, it’ll work with your iPhone too, just without the Capture app and its wireless transfer. There’s also an iOne interface, which cuts out the MIDI, and drops the channel count to one.
For the price, the iTwo was always going to be good value as a multi-purpose two-channel interface. But with onboard MIDI, it makes itself useful for live performance too, and the wireless transfer function is more than just a gimmick. If you subtract the $135 value of the included Studio One software, you’re paying barely $100 for a really useful piece of kit.
RESPONSES