soundcraft ghost without the preamps?

[wes480]

is there any way you can get a board like the SC Ghost....for it's mixing/sound capability....but not get the preamps, so as to make it cheaper?

Or are the preamps *really* that good, that even if you had a nice rack of preamps to use, the ones on the Ghost would still come in handy?

-wes

[TexRoadkill]

Then you would just have a line level mixer. There are some out there but I've never seen one laid out like a regular mixing console. They are usually rackmounted and made more for submixing and 'set and forget'.

If you have a rack of API's and Manleys than you might find the Ghost pre's a waste but not many studios have 24 channels of pres. You can never have too many of anything.

What kind of pre's are you comparing the Ghost to? They are probably better than anything under $1000 per channel and if you do the math that is a pretty good deal for 24-32 of them.

[skippy]

True statement. The Ghost's pres are very good indeed.

I'm not a big believer in "boutique" preamps. That's a fashion that I've never adopted, somehow. I'll use an external pre once in a blue moon for something really unusual, but 99% of the time I use the pres in the Ghost- and I don't generally find them wanting at all.

The only thing you might run into trouble with is if you routinely work with acoustically quiet sources and use ribbon mics on them: the Ghost pres do get a tad bit noisy above 50dB of gain, and in that case a boutique pre that is optimized for extreme gains *will* beat them. But for 99% of your routine recording chores with high-output dynamics or condensers, the Ghost pres'll do you just fine.

However, you have to remember that I'm a little bit of a throwback: just because I _can_ color the heck out of every track, doesn't mean I have to! I'm way the heck behind the times... (;-)