Presonus is enlarging its DigiMax range with the FS, a brand new 8 class A mic preamp in a 1U rack. It feeds 8 channels in ADAT (i/o) at 24bit/96 kHz in dual SMUX with balanced direct outputs and inserts on each channel.

Price and availability TBA.

Soundcape announced a bunch of MADI 1U racks to come this year:
- iBox MADI-HD2, a converter 2 x 32 MADI ports/Digidesign Pro Tools|HD card, in both direction, with word/wordclock, latency compensation, USB control/update… Available in June 06 for EUR 2395.
- iBox 32|64 MADI-S a converter 32 channels of AES/EBU In (16x AES) and 64 Channels of AES/EBU Out (32x AES) to an optical MADI port. Price EUR 2895.
- iBox 64|32 MADI-S a converter 64 Channels of AES/EBU In (32x AES) and 32 Channels of AES/EBU Out (16x AES) to an optical MADI port. Price EUR 2895.
- Pak 64|64 MADI-S, a bundle of the 2 converters above. Price EUR 5995.
iBox 32|64 MADI-S, iBox 64|32 MADI-S and the pak will be available third quarter 06.

MacMusic is very proud to publish a second photo gallery of the Frankfurt Musikmesse, taken by our crazy correspondents Soif and Nolot. Lots of gear (CME, DaFact, Creamware, RME, Steinberg, Digidesign), all the hottest new products on display, and this year booth babes (not E3 babes, but music babes !).

Live 5, Pro Tools 7, Vienna Symphonic Library, Guitare Rig 2, Genelec 8050A, Arturia Prophet V, Clavia Nord Stage, or M-Audio Project mix I/O, are some of the 2006 MIPA Awards winners in Frankfurt. 58 magazines from all over the world got together to vote for the best products of 2005/2006 in more than 40 categories. The awards have been presented to the winners at a special mipa-Party/Awards-Ceremony held during Musikmesse / Prolight + Sound, March 30th, 2006.

Just clic on the link bellow to read the full list of MIPA'06 winners.

TerraTec announce its forthcoming Area 61 Keyboard. This alien territory is a mix between a 61 keys controller keyboard, a USB 2.0 audio/MIDI interface, an expandable synth and DSP synth host. The controller part adds to the velocity sensitive keyboard an interesting split aftertouch, 10 encoders with LED, 5 buttons, and 2 rubber mod wheels, all assignable. The interface is stereo, 24bit/96KHz, Midi In and Out/thru. The sound generation part is optional, you can add sound modules like the WaveXtable. One of the main interests of the Area 61 is to DSP host the latest TerraTec Komplexer softsynth (ex-waldorf employees development), but sadly it is not supported on the mac at the moment.

Available third quarter 06 for EUR 599.