pre amp needed with Mbox?

[anton]

Hey Everyone,

I have an Mbox and two MXL 603's. The sound quality i am getting is better than with my AKG C1000S. But i feel i might need a seperate preamp, even though the Mbox already has one. I am recording mostly solo fingerstyle guitar, and i can't seem to get a strong enough signal into pro tools. Volume wise it sounds ok, but the wave form in the edit window is real small. Not quite sure how to describe it. The best way is that the distance between the peaks and valleys on the wave are real small. Its closer to a straight line than something i would expect from a guitar played at a decent volume. I had the gain on the Mbox set pretty high. The problem i see in this is that editing and doing punches would be hard, cause its more difficult to distinguish between different sections.

Do any of you Mbox owners use a seperate preamp, like a DMP3 or something? I was thinking of getting one, as they are cheap enough.


Hope the above made sense.



anton

[Jeyan]

See if this idea works.....everybody knows mbox has an inferior preamp but the 002 has a very good pre amp, now they are offering a upgrade policy in protools for mbox and 001 users. you can get around $400 off on Digi 002 rack, that means you can get a 002 for around $700-$800, isn't that a sweet deal? Instead of buying a preamp you could think about this. Just a thought.

[charger]

There's some buttons at the top of your Pro Tools edit window that look like little arrows. Clicking the left and right ones make the waveform zoom out and zoom in. Clicking the UP and DOWN arrows makes the waveform taller and shorter, so you can see more detail. You can also try enlarging the track size in the edit window, by clicking the little arrow where the track name is, choosing track size, and picking small, medium, large, etc.