I do not understand "lot of series resistance"? I am known here to NOT be the biggest F'rite fanboy but they DO make excellent preamps and since THE basic principle of a really low noise amp is NOT to put resistors in series with the signal, they would not do that!
I wish that I can get a copy of the schematics of the front end to show you.
on these types of preamps, there is usually like a 4.7 ohm resistor bypassed with a 1.5uH inductor. The purpose of it is to prevent oscillations at low input impedances. When I measured between the phantom blocking cap and one side of the differential input it was 620 ohms instead of the expected <1 ohm.
I got rid of that 2i2 two years ago, maybe I should pick up the new version and see if they fixed that. I don't need it, but it might be fun to look under the hood of the new version and see what could be better with them (because I operated a newer version a fellow musician had and it seemed to behave but I was using a condensor mic instead of a low z dynamic at the time, but the gain didn't have a good contour to the range of the knob (the gain became too much too soon and it took some time fidgeting to find the nice place in between) )