I won't deny the Sytek is a good quality preamp for the money, but I'm not sure it's the best, given your budget, for recording drums. The main reason is that i found it didn't have the gobs of headroom (and wasn't very friendly when pushed too hard) that are extremely useful when recording drums.
Especially given Murphy's corollary # 4-b: No matter how you set your preamp levels during sound check, the drummer will always find a way to clip your preamps at least a few times during the session.
Since you have a $2500 budget, I would check into the ATI 8MX2. The preamps are excellent (they're based on
the Paragon live mixer preamps) and you get the really wonderful extra feature that it can function as an 8x2 mixer as well. That means you can take the eight inputs (like say, a pass of 8 backup vocalists) and submix them down to a stereo output, including setting up panning on each mic. That way you can record your backup vocal pass onto just two tape tracks. Very useful if you are going to do four passes - so you end up with 8 tape tracks instead of 32.
Or, as another possibilty, you could just submix three toms down to a pair of tape tracks using the stereo submixer, while sending the other mics direct to tape keeping them each on their own track.
Because it is only one rack space, it makes for an excellent portable set of preamps for remote recordings too. I've used this preamp for mic'ing drum kits quite often, and I've gotten great results. I don't use it as much as i used to, only because now I have some API and Neve channels that often get the call instead.
