Presonus Faderport 16

Using Cubase 10.5

I've tried a few of these DAW controllers using the mackie protocol and all seem to have issues or short comings one way or another. I think maybe this is one I've settled on however, but that doesn't mean I'm in love with it.

Firstly, it's sturdy and seems to be built well. The faders have a nice enough action, but I expected at this price to be a bit smoother. Installation of the driver and firmware was OK.

General operation of the faders for volume, pan control, select, mute and solo all works OK. But beyond this you start to see the limitations of the minimalist control format. e.g. In order to arm a track you need to slip in and out of a mode. This means that you cannot see your armed tracks unless your in this mode... it's not ideal but workable.

I then came across something that was initially quite disturbing. When using the sends mode, where various controls for channel sends should be spilled across the faders, it seemed that whenever you tried to switch a send on, it instead selected the channel associated with that fader. So that appeared unusable. Eventually I worked out that in order to use this correctly with cubase you need to disable 'enable auto select' in each mackie control setup. I found lots of people having this issue and very little response to it on the web. Some have sent their units back because of it. Although it's not a problem with the faderport, Presonus could easily add this to their cubase setup documentation, but so far they've not done so. Seems like a quick win to me, but there you go.

Another minor bug, but a bit annoying, it that sometimes the scribble strips show random info rather than the channel info you expect. You have to switch in and out of another mode to correct it. I hope they can fix this in a firmware update.

Anyway, the main thing I like about this is having a nice set of motorised long throw faders in front of me for quick mixing/monitoring changes and this is efficient in space and I'm learning to put up with it's idiosyncrasies.

Importantly, all the things it says it does in the manual, it does. Compared to other products I've used (mentioning no names), which don't have a manual and the implementation doesn't seem to work correctly with cubase in my experience.

So is this worth the money? I don't think so. Like I say it's better than it's cheaper rivals, but I'm not sure why I'm paying 800 euros + for it. I think that I would be happy if it was a little cheaper. 500 or 600.

This review may sound a little harsh, but it's more about the fact that all of these devices seems to miss the mark . Certainly up to this price point. In general this is definitely the best I've used, and I may start to love it when I get the workflow into my muscle memory more.