Sorry, missed most of your questions, here goes;
"if so, what is a good all in one console at a 200 dollar range that can do the trick for me? " - At this price point, something by Behringer or Sampson would probably be your best bet. The farther you go up the food chain, the more flexibility you find.
"are there any such thing as a bad preamp? a guy is trying to sell me an m tube preamp at his shop for 129.00 dollars. " - With your budget, I wouldn't even consider getting a pre-amp. The mic inputs on the above mixers will work OK, and the mixer will give you more options than the pre-amp would. Until you reach a point where you are looking at condenser mics, you won't see enough difference to make it worth it. The SM-58 isn't a flat frequency response mic, but until you have a budget that's over $2000 or so, I would wait on the more esoteric stuff. There are other dynamic mics that will give you flatter response for recording, such as
the Audio Technica ATM-25. They can be had for about $140 mail order, and will do a really good job on kick, bass, piano, etc - The ATM-25 will also give you more balls on a mic'ed guitar cabinet, since it goes down to 30 hZ or so instead of the 50 hZ of the SM-58.
"so if preamping and equing before is better then what type of eq do i want to get? ie. parametric paragraphic two band so on......" - As the other guys stated before, you should try to get a sound you like FIRST, then do the least you can to screw it up on the way to being recorded. Any EQ, whether an outboard analog unit or the internal Cubase EQ, will cause phasing problems when used to BOOST a band of frequencies. The cheaper the EQ, the worse it will be for that. Serious engineers usually try to cut rather than boost, since this introduces much less error. The general rule is "cut narrow, boost wide" - meaning, the narrower band you cut and the wider band that you boost, the less it will stand out. If the goal is a "natural" sound, the less obvious your changes the better. Another trick engineers use is to boost two close frequencies a little bit, rather than boost one frequency band a lot. This introduces less phase shifting and sounds more natural. It also requires an EQ that is fancy enough to allow you 3 or 4 identical equalizers that can be set to close frequency centers. In hardware, this is never cheap. As far as a graphinc EQ is concerned, ones you or I could afford will screw up the sound even when set flat. My feeling is that, for the most part, graphics should be limited to live sound, and even then only used for quick feedback control. Even for that function, one of the auto-feedback control units will do a less intrusive job quicker, since they notch out only the offending frequency in a very narrow band.
"could i use preamp, eq for a midi keyboard also? " - keyboards usually have a level that is already high enough to go into the line level inputs on a small console. As to EQ, that would depend on the keyboard itself. If it allows serious tweaking of sounds, it is normally better to do that til you get the sound you like WITHOUT adding EQ, for the same reasons stated above.
"and i'm using a ton of eq, limiting, compresing, you name it plugins on cubase." - The more you follow the suggestions of everybody here, the less this should be necessary. One thing you should do is to play some commercially done CD's thru your computer and monitoring system, and see what they sound like. Then try to get your own tracks close to that sound (brightness, bottom, etc) this should help make your music translate to other systems better. Also, if you're using the full version of Cubase, consider enabling the 32-bit float mode of internal processing, whether you are using 44.1 sample rate or higher. This will require more disk space and cut you back on the total number of available tracks, but will give you the cleanest recordings and processing you can get. Then, when you burn a CD you will dither down to 16 bit. This keeps any processing you do in the computer from doing any more damage to the original sounds than is necessary. I don't remember if the Audigy supports 24 bit recording, but if so use it - that nearly eliminates the need to push levels near clipping (by using compression and limiting) during record in order to maintain signal-to-noise and dynamic range, since you will be "throwing away" the least significant 8 bits during dithering back to 16 bit when going to CD.
When in doubt, try something (unless you think it will damage your gear, then ask here) - Do nothing to the sound that isn't necessary, and then only do half of what you think you need - most effects are better when you only notice their absence. Your ears should be the last word on whether something works; after all, the sound is what we're here for... Steve
