Mic pre amp and monitoring through a desk.

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Bip Bop

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This is my first post here although I am by no means a newbie to recording. However, I must confess that although I am a professional composer/arranger/producer it is the musical side and not the technical side which sustains my livelihood, in other words technically speaking, I get by on a wing and a prayer. So much for the intro, here's my question...

I have been recording vocals through the built in pre amps of my old Spirit Studio mixer into a Motu 2408 Mk2 audio interface to my Mac Pro running Logic 9. The desk is playing up a little and I don't think it is economical to have it overhauled so I am considering buying a pre amp such as the Presonus Eureka or some such.

I am unsure as to the best way to monitor the vocalist as I do not want to go down the software monitoring/latency route and I can't see a way to get the mic signal into my DAW via the pre amp and 2408 but avoiding the signal passing through my desk. However I do want to take an out from either the pre or the interface into the desk for monitoring. Unfortunately I don't see the units have a separate output. I have heard of someone using a splitter lead, making one half go from the pre amp to the 2408 and the other half to the desk but does that mean the signal will be at all degraded or weakened?

Sorry if this all sounds too muddled.
 
If you're mainly recording one or two tracks at a time, you'll probably do best to just buy another mixer. Small mixers with 2-4 inputs are not expensive, and they include preamps that are perfectly useable. Then you can connect it as explained in this article:

Using a Mixer with a DAW

--Ethan
 
Thanks, I read the article, excellent. But wouldn't a good dedicated pre amp such as the Presonus or Focusrite and especially some of the more expensive ones produce a superior sound than an inexpensive mixer's built it one?
 
BB
Does the Motu unit have a headphone out? You could use this for direct monitoring back into the desk.
Dags
 
Dags said:
BB
Does the Motu unit have a headphone out? You could use this for direct monitoring back into the desk.
Dags
Click to expand...
Yeah but the whole DAW's output ie, all the recorded tracks are coming through as well as the vocal.
 
Bip Bop said:
Thanks, I read the article, excellent. But wouldn't a good dedicated pre amp such as the Presonus or Focusrite and especially some of the more expensive ones produce a superior sound than an inexpensive mixer's built it one?
Click to expand...

thats a loaded question....quality goes up if all the other stuff is there. for example, i recall my first large D mic, condensor, super sensitive and the noise went up about 10times on my takes, it was so bad I had to investigate it and surprisingly it was picking up the noisy fan in my attic through the vents!
it took a lot of other work then to use that mic...so the room had to get "fixed up" too.

its why i got a SM7 mic because it was mentioned to help take the "room out". then a preamp/compressor...channel strip...then DAW plug's. I have a DAW interface, line 6 that has a unique setupo and so the tones are all done on the pc through a "gearbox " thing, that allows selectin vocals, or guitars, or bass...then each has a chain of options, like Noise Gate, different sims of classic compressors and preamps.

but what your talking about is repalcing the channels on your desk....you might like channel strips better than the preamp only route. or the ISA one is a full eq-ish, preamp, channel but can also have two channels with instrument.
 
Bip Bop said:
Yeah but the whole DAW's output ie, all the recorded tracks are coming through as well as the vocal.
Click to expand...

I would have thought the headphone output grabs all audio coming through the unit. I could be wrong.

Just to cover a bit of old ground, I use Logic Pro 9 with MOTU interfaces on a Mac pro and the latency I get is usually very low. Have you experimented with lowering your buffer size to reduce latency?
If you're still getting loads of latency, this is a very interesting fix up that I documented on the Logic Pro forum for V8 which may work with V9: Switch one channel - audio channel or aux not being used - to be surround mode. Zero latency for your record-armed channel with software monitoring on. Wierdest sh*t I have ever come across but it works.

If you can kill the monitoring-whilst-recording latency then you can comfortably use any preamp you wish and route everything out of the MOTU to your desk for monitoring.

Good luck!
Dags
 
What I do is I route my preamps into my motu, then using the motu software, I send the mic signal out one of the outputs on the motu and into my desk for monitoring. There is no latency. If you aren't going to have a desk and are just going to monitor from the motu, you can use their mixing software to send the mic signal to the main outputs that you are monitoring the daw from. It lets you adjust the volume and panning and newer versions will even let you add effects for monitoring purposes.
 
Thanks for all the help so far everyone.

I will try Farview's motu software option first if I can work it out, as it seems the simplest solution.

Farview, I have Motu PCI CueMix Console on my Mac. Is that the program you mean?
 
That's it. it works really well. I have both a 2408 and a 24io. the direct outs from the board go to the 24io, which I just monitor through the board. All of my outward preamps are fed into the 2408 and that is set up so each preamp comes out of a different output of the 2408 and into its own channel on the mixer. That way I can make headphones mixes with the board.

When I finally decide to get rid of the mixer, I will probably just end up doing what I suggested you do.
 
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