I'd probably upgrade the preamp and mic at the same time.... The problems are coming from pretty much all around.
- The 1010LT preamps barely qualify as preamps. Most people jumper them to line level and pretend they don't exist.
- The 1010LT converters leave much to be desired. My experience was that everything sounded smeared through them.
- The mic is a bog standard Chinese LDC with all the high end harshness that traditionally accompanies them.
I suspect you would hear a huge improvement by upgrading pretty much any part of your signal chain. What you should do depends on how much you want to spend.
On the interface front, I'm guessing you aren't recording 8 inputs or else you'd have multiple external preamps already. If I'm right about that, you might consider some of the 2-channel USB or FireWire offerings that have decent preamps built-in. As a bonus, you'd get better converters as part of the package.
Alternatively, if you are planning to do a lot of multichannel stuff, you could go with a mixer with decent pres like the Peavey PV series and tie that into the 1010LT. You might even consider the Peavey PV series USB mixers. They're only stereo for recording and playback via USB, but for the 99% of the time that you're only recording one or two channels, you'd have the benefit of better conversion, etc. And when you need to record eight independent channels, just hook up the Delta 1010LT to the inserts and you instantly have a bunch of preamps on the front end.
On the mic front, there are probably a dozen mics under $300 that would utterly pants the B-2 Pro. Any of CAD's LDCs, the AT4040, any of several Røde mics, etc. Which one you should get depends more on your voice than anything else.
If I were picking a system, I'd probably pick a MOTU HD192 with a Neumann U67, but realistically you'd probably do reasonably well with something like a
Phonic Helix 12 FireWire MKII and a
CAD M9 or even a
CAD M179.
Ooh. The M179 is down to $135 now.
