mic pre or mic!?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pughbert
  • Start date Start date
P

Pughbert

New member
I notice a lot of people always suggesting to people to get a pre, no matter what mic, room, instruments there working with. My weakness in signal chain is the lack of a good LDC. I use a nice firewire 10/10 card with 'get-byable' pre's and will now spend as much as i can scrape togeather on a nicer mic. But im curious on how others would see it.

would you sooner have a less expensive/quality mic and outboard pre for your dosh?

or

a nicer mic, spending all the money there and just use the pres on your desk or interface?
 
it was said somewhere else here once, by whom i don't know, that "a good mic is the difference between night and day, a good preamp is the difference between early and late morning" or something to that effect. it's very true. Your mic, in my opinion and i'd imagine most others, is the most important component in your recording. I personally would rather have a really nice mic without anything else ever being used in the signal chain, or ran through processors at mixdown, than an okay mic ran through a ton of eq's, compressors, reverb, etc. The only thing more important than the mic itself is where you place the mic.
 
I vote mic, that's where energy is transformed from air pressure to electricity. The preamp only magnifies the electrical signal. A great mic through a shitty pre will still sound good, and shitty mic through a great pre will still sound shitty. Put it another way a nice pre brings out the potential in a mic, but won't give you quality the mic doesn't have in the first place. 2cents
 
To some extent, I think a good pre can make lower end mics more usable than a low end pre can make a good mic.
 
I've seen this too. Except it's usually recommended to get a 'decent' pre before upgrading to a nice mic. If the pre's are usable (ie better than behr... mini mixers) they should be able to get a lot out of a nice mic (although you haven't said what your current mic/pre are). Most 10/10 firewire devices are equiped with pretty ok pres. Depending on what mic you already have I'd vote MIC next.
 
Without knowing what mics and pres you already have it is difficult to suggest either.
 
i wasnt so much asking for suggestions, im pretty much set on what im going to buy (AT 4040). I was more curious what other peoples views on mic, or pre being the priority were, for them.

Like i mentioned, for me id much sooner spend all my avalible cash on the mic.

For what its worth though the only LCD i use right now is a SP B1 (i use dynamics more, and borrow the mics whe recording drums).
I use a edirol FW 101, Mac.G5 and logic.

But its more a question of curiosity!
 
This was hashed out recently in another thread (true for most "new" threads), and there was a supprising number of people on the pre side. I was just listening to a bunch of clips over at the listening sessions, and I can't for the life of me understand that stance. I started out listening to a bunch of preamp comparisons, and struggled to hear much of a difference. I should point out that I was listening to MP3s at work on an onboard sound chip through cheap headphones , so the subtleties of the preamps were hard to hear. But the point is, when I listened to the mic comparisons, I could have heard the difference through a tin can and a string.

-RD
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top