New member looking for guidance on new mic preamp (low priced)

tony22

New member
Hi everyone. I'm new here but I do audio listening room measurments for DRC on the cheap. Up to this point I've used an E-mu 0404 USB and calibrated Behringer ECM8000 for the hardware end of things. Recently it looks like the E-mu has died on me. Either I'm not getting any gain out of either mic preamplifier, or the 48V phantom power is dead, or something. I can't get any reasonable signal out of it when using the mic level inputs. I know the mic is okay. I've looked around and it seems like the 0404 USB 2.0 is nowhere to be found; many places have it listed as discontinued.

Since it's not clear to me what the future of the E-mu product line is, I decided I didn't want to spend that kind of money to replace it (there's a used one on eBay going for more than I paid for mine when it was new!). I've been looking at the Tascam US-122 MkII, the Presound Firestudio Mobile, and the Focusrite Scartlett 2i2. Looking for recommendations on which has the best performance in terms of mic preamp performance, gain & noise, stability on Win XP & 7x64 Pro platforms... the usual. I have both USB and Firewire interfaces available. I only need two signal inputs.

One of the things that I didn't like about the E-mu was how the frequency response fell off with an increase in gain of the mic preamp. It made the effective usable gain of that box much smaller than what was available. I want the replacement to have a nice flat 20-20K response as measured at full gain (or as good as I can get for the price). Thanks in advance for the help.
 
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