Can I use a stereo receiver as a mic preamp?

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selfcase

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I was checking out the how-to page for recording stuff from turntables etc, and they said you could run the turntable into a receiver instead of a special phono pre-amp..

So can I use a receiver as a pre-amp for a microphone?
 
if it has a microphone input yes!

if not then you need a mic preamp in front of the reciever!

i think rotel recievers used to come with mic inputs...
 
..

Nice, I can't wait to get home to see if either of my receivers have a mic input. Will the gain added to the mic be equivalent to that of a preamp/mixer? (I suppose I could just amplify the sound later using software, though).

Thanks!
 
>they said you could run the turntable into a receiver instead of a special phono pre-amp..

Only because most receivers come with a built-in pre specially designed for phono sources. There is a specific EQ on a phono signal that must be applied by the pre-amp to compensate. So it will mangle a mic signal which doesn't have that EQ applied.
 
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Oh fuck, so it's no good then?

I guess I'll spring for a mixer. Any idea how much (canadian) I should expect to pay for the cheapest [decent] mixer out there with preamp/XLR/etc?
 
Selfcase, I notice you are looking for a lot of creative solutions to get out of buying a preamp. If anything else worked we would all be doing it.

You probably can get a signal using a home stereo or whatnot but it will sound vastly inferior to a preamp or mixer. If the mic is crap it might not be that big of an issue and if you just want to hear the vocals it will work. If you want them to sound good also there is no way around the preamp.
 
Don't give up! Take a look at your receiver. It just MIGHT have a mic jack. Not very common but not unknown. Another common piece of equipment that (more commonly) has a mic pre is a standalone cassette deck or reel-reel deck.
 
Mic preamp

There are mic preamps in lots of things, just not very good ones.

You probably have one somewhere in your house, though probably not in your stereo receiver.

Basically, anything that has a plug for a microphone pretty much must have a mic preamp. Portable cassette players, boom boxes, video-cameras and minidisk recorders are likely candidates. If you can get a line-out, you could try using this thing as a preamp. It may not be very good, of course.

As noted above, there's no snazzy magic involved in using a stereo receiver as a phone preamp -- the reason you can use a stereo receiver (most stereo receivers, anyway) as a phono preamp is because it has a phono preamp in it. A phono preamp makes a particularly not-good mic preamp.
 
..

I live in Ottawa, Canada, and for some reason all the stores I have been to that sell used recording equipment sell it for ridiculous prices.

For example, there was an Art Tube preamp, used very much and looking like garbage, going for $470 canadian. Radioshack mixers are like $10101010189327 dollars.


Maybe I can make one out of aluminum foil and paper clips or something.. No..

Anyway, I'm really starting to become interested in home recording, and I find myself more and more wanting to go straight home and start recording stuff, so you'll have to excuse me from being dumb and asking all these questions and feeling like there must be some magic way to find the perfect mic preamp.. Someone should draft up some schematics for making one. Seriously.

Out of curiosity, what makes a preamp significantly better than another preamp? Is it just the amount of gain?
 
order an art preamp from musician's friend. 79$ us.

or buy an audiobuddy 2 channel mic preamp from interstate music for 79$.

im sure those places will ship to kanada!

all the online stores should ship to you.

i was really only going along with your joke before cause your stereo equipment is unlikely to have mic inputs. if it did however it would probably be perfectly usable as your stereo would then output line level.

solid state preamps are cheap to manufacture and have ridiculously low distortion levels if you dont overdrive them. the differences between different ones are mostly emphases on different frequencies due to differences in design and manufacture.
 
the significantly better ones use vacuum tubes and/or handwired handmade components and more complex designs to achieve a certain characteristic sound.
 
You can make your own preamps for pretty cheap. There are some sites on the web with info. I've never tried it so I can't say how good they are.

In general a good preamp will boost the level without adding too much of it's own noise.

DC offset is a little complicated to explain here. It is basically what happens when your waveform gets off centered from 0 and it results in premature clipping.

www.digido.com has some good tutorials with diagrams.
 
I use the mic preamp built into an old Tascam 4-track reel to reel recorder. It works great! The Tascam was not being used where I work, so I got is as surplus. I can plug my mic, guitar pedal, built-in acoustic pickup and Dean Markley acoustic pickup into it all at the same time. Then I run R/L RCA jacks to miniphone plug in to my line input on my laptop.
 
RadioShack has small pocket manuals on how to build digital circuits, and they're pretty good. Usually in the back with the electronic componets, and I'm sure that I saw one on a mic pre in the past.
 
Yes, you can, you can also drive a car with your feet, but why would you want too?
 
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