Ya know, I have to solidly go with Brandondrury. There are MUCH more important issues before deciding on equipment choices, since even the worst of the barrel in equipment, can be pretty decent nowadays. I agree completely with Brandondrury's list too....with the potential exception of #4...having a bunch of different mics. Just some good, clean, accurate ones instead.
I am also not shocked that the guys girlfriend in the above post couldn't hear a diff in the mackie vs highend preamp. While the mackies aren't top notch, they are nice and clean...or sterile, brittle..however you want to look at it...but extremely usable. Sure when you stack 24 tracks of 'em up, it starts to hurt... BUT 24 tracks of poorly mic'd anything will hurt even more.
mic placement and technique will make a much larger diff than what kind of mic your are using imo...thus negating what preamp you are even using too... another useless opinion!
so...in that context, if you are micing a "average"
acoustic guitar with an "average" mic in an "average" room...how are you going to accurately tell the difference between something as subtle as a preamp could be? A lot of people claim to have ears I KNOW they don't have.
I would like to see a trend of COMPLETELY nuetral sounding preamps and mics being geared towards home recordists, so they could develop the above skills in Branddrury's post...then move on to the "dessert" with mics with exotic flavours. The guy just starting out with a PC and a Nady mic doesn't need a 4kHz hump in his mic response to "help" him, eh?? at least in my opinion.