know you’ ve designed deep integration with PreSonus Studio One Pro 7. Can you walk me through that?
[ Oscar ] Sure. With rack-mounted gear, you don’ t always want to walk across the room to tweak settings. In Studio One, we’ ve built direct control of the interface right into the mixer— gain, phantom power, and auto gain can all be controlled from within the DAW. It’ s fully bidirectional, so filters, EQ roll-offs, and more can be toggled directly from Studio One. It’ s about keeping you in the creative zone without extra steps.
[ WM ] I noticed that Fender had input on designing the first two instrument channels. What was their role?
[ Oscar ] This is the first time since Fender’ s acquisition of PreSonus that our engineers collaborated directly. We borrowed circuitry concepts from Fender’ s Tone Master Pro to design the Quantum’ s instrument inputs. It’ s not a one-to-one copy, but it’ s Fender-inspired, and it’ s a big leap forward for guitarists who expect pro-level DI tone.
[ WM ] I also saw two dedicated reamp outputs below inputs one and two. How do those work in practice?
[ Oscar ] Reamping with the PreSonus HD8 is simple. You can record a dry guitar track, then route it through the Quantum’ s reamp outputs back into pedals, amps, or any external gear. From there, you mic it or return the line signal into another input. In Studio One, you’ ll even see“ Reamp 1” and“ Reamp 2” listed as output options.
[ WM ] Worship musicians often use outboard gear and preamps. How does the Quantum HD 8 handle hardware inserts?
[ Oscar ] When you plug into the line-level inputs, the mic pre is bypassed entirely— so it’ s a clean, direct path. That allows you to send audio out to external gear and then return it to another input. It’ s a straightforward workflow for integrating analog equipment into your DAW sessions.
[ WM ] I read that the Quantum HD 8 can operate as a standalone mixer. How does that work?
[ Oscar ] The main use case is in the studio. Say you have synths or drum machines hooked up, and you don’ t want to power on your computer. The last settings you configured in Universal Control are saved to the hardware. Power it on, and you can monitor everything without a computer. It’ s not primarily designed for live use, but it can work if needed.
[ WM ] One thing worship teams care about is reliability. In testing the Quantum HD 8, I noticed the drivers are rock solid.
[ Oscar ] Yes— our drivers are custom-built for both Mac and Windows. Latency is extremely low, around 2.5 ms round-trip. It’ s a bit lower on Mac, thanks to Apple’ s operating system optimizations, but both platforms perform at a professional level. We wanted Quantum HD 8 to compete with interfaces costing much more.
[ WM ] That’ s impressive. And speaking of
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