I have the manual for each of these products...so I know a little bit about them :)

I use the Twintrack which is similar to the voicemaster. That peice could come in handy, it has good optical compression and some decent EQ.

The reverbs on the other hand...if you are mixing in the box, they just don't serve much purpose. Unless you have a really, REALLY good one, the plugins will sound just as good with less noise.

ACtually, the reverbs will be of great help to you since your Mac book doesn't really have enough juice to run several high quality revs in addition to whatever other plugins you are running.

Teh Focusrite piece is ok and definitely worth the price you paid :)

Considering they were free, and that your setup is not high end to begin with I'd say use them, especially the REV500.

I have never used a macbook, I didn't realize they were so useless that they couldn't run reverbs.
I used to have a Toshiba 2.4 notebook that would run several Waves RVerbs + a bunch of other plugins.

Is it even possible to use them with the firepod? Does it have the connections for Aux ins and outs, or would you have to record the reverb on the way in?

Thanks for all of your input, I'm glad to hear that these pieces are of decent quality. I'm looking forward to experimenting with them on my next session. As for the quality of the MacBook, it has the processing power to use reverb plug-ins. However, I am using Cubase LE at the moment, and I hate the way the plugins, specifically the reverb and compression ones, are integrated, so these outboard pieces will prove useful in the future.