This is a review and detailed measurements of the Presonus Microstation BT Bluetooth receiver and volume control plus headphone amp. It was kindly purchased new by a member and sent to me for testing. It costs US $130 from Amazon.
The main focus of testing this type of product is a nice volume control and balanced inputs and outputs:
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All the controls feel nice. The case though is a bit light with the load of heaving balanced cables causing it fall backward. Wish they would weigh down the bottom a bit more. There are nice buttons for Bluetooth selection and pairing which I appreciated.
Unexpectedly so, there is also subwoofer and headphone outputs:
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Power is supplied via USB-C connector. Disappointed that no adapter was in the box. I initially powered it with my monitor USB hub. What that worked, it produced a bit more low frequency noise than using a non-name stand-alone phone charger.
Presonus MicroStation BT Pre-amp Measurements
Let's start with testing the wired performance with TRS input and output:
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Performance is excellent while feeding it 2 volts in and out. Switching to 4 volts in and out caused severe distortion as you see here:
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As long as you can stay with 2 volts out, SINAD of 102 dB is quite good for this type of product. Dynamic range is a bit better:
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Frequency response is pretty flat and wide:
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Sub output is pretty wideband though so you probably need a secondary filter.
IMD distortion is not bad either for the kind of product we have:
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Microstation Headphone Measurements
Headphone output is mostly a checklist feature although subjectively in my testing with AKG K371, it sounded good:
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The rather high output impedance eats into power at 33 ohm.
Microstation Bluetooth Measurements
As usual, performance of BT input is codec dependent:
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I expected SBC to do better across the board based on my last set of tests but it is a mixed bag here with all that noise.
Note how max output has dropped even more now to 1.5 volt.
Here is the noise performance:
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And SBC:
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These are much better number than the
Kali Balanced NV-BT interface. Dynamic range is as much as 20 dB better which is what want as the Kali was decidedly noisy.
Listening Tests
I did some quick Bluetooth listening tests to mostly check for noise. I could only detect progressive hissing when the volume knob was at 3:00pm to max. Prior to that, it was quite silent even after I fed it to a Topping A90 in high gain mode. Once I heard a bit of static but could not replicate it.
Conclusions
Finally, we have a decently designed Bluetooth adapter with balanced output. But we also get bonus items in the form of a balanced volume control, sub and headphone output. Performance is not state of the art but as long as you don't push the volume control to max, the box should be transparent.
I am happy to recommend the Presonus Microstation BT.
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