mixing board pre amps

  • Thread starter Thread starter fprod south
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Re: Re: Re: mixing board pre amps

toby.I. said:
pundit said:
....-so if a 50,000 dollar console spends 10dollars on components per channel how much on a a fucking 500 dollar pre?? not much. you have to spend over about a grand on a pre to get op amps that you can but for a few dollars each. the problem is when boards spend a hundredth of that on the op amps( which most non-pro consoles do).
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Sure a $500 pre would be lucky to have $50 'retail' worth of components in it. Read maybe half of that if made in China!

Of course I'm not just talking about the opamps... you still need XLR connectors, PCB's, power supplies, 48v phantom, switches, pots, nice silk screened case, vintage knobs plus the rest pf the components and a few tens of thousands of dollars to market it. Also good quality capacitors are not particulary cheap either and can play quite big part in the sound as well.

Most modern consoles use pretty generic preamp designs, at best, based around two transistors followed by an opamp... at worse just based around a common garden variety opamp for all the gain. Some use low noise wide bandwith instrumention amplifier chips which are essentially some very low noise tightly matched transistors, and all the other relavent 'bits' contained in one package. These may actually out perform some totally discrete designs because of very accurate matching and thermal tracking.

A $1000+ pre may have quite pricey custom wound transformers, a $50 gold plated precision rotary attenuation switch, selected 'A' grade components, very low ripple power supply etc. High quality capacitors used in 48v phantom decoupling... apart from elsewhere.

The preamp in a Mackie VLZ PRO desk is built from surface mounts components that collectively, excluding the power supply and other hardware, probably cost less than 50 cents per channel in production component costs!

So basically you have to spend $500, on an outboard pre alone, to get about $50 worth of bits if you're lucky. Spend a grand and you 'may' get $100 worth of 'bits.'

So why not just go out and buy the 'bits' for $100 and build your own? Well I have in the past.... AND as long as I don't add my labor, all the driving around in the car, the burnt and cut fingers, the hair pulling, the wrongly drilled holes etc... :rolleyes:

Of course good components won't salvage a bad design. Yet even with a good design, are you building it to save money or, is it your quest for the Holy Grail of preamps?

So if I do value my labor at $10 per hour, how does my '$1000' home built pre sound? As good as a $500 pre?... maybe better?... maybe worse?

And the fact when I sell it, if I ever do, I 'may' get $10 in a garage sale for it.... well yeah I guess it's a bargain!

But it was fun at the time! ;)

So toby.I... you wanna build your own pre? How about your very own tube mic? How about a Pultec Eq... or an Urei 1176 replica?

Well get your ass over to where all the DIY recirding audio gear freaks hang out...

Techtalk DIY

From there you can check out Jakob's and Kev's sites.... just follow the links!

;)
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you trying to be funny? i was merely comenting on the fact the the breakdown on the console suggested that the pres actually used 500 dollars worth of components. the mackie mixers u mentioned were an example of the point i was trying to make, which completely went over your head. the pres in mackies sound really really bad, as soon as you have somthing any good at all to compare them with.
 
toby.I. said:
you trying to be funny? i was merely comenting on the fact the the breakdown on the console suggested that the pres actually used 500 dollars worth of components. the mackie mixers u mentioned were an example of the point i was trying to make, which completely went over your head. the pres in mackies sound really really bad, as soon as you have somthing any good at all to compare them with.
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What I was in fact 'hinting' at is a $50,000 console will NOT use $500 worth of components in each of it's pres. From a manufacturing viewpoint it's not viable to spend half the total cost of the console on the pres alone. Sure it may sound great, but if the faders fall apart, the patchbays disintegrate and the automation doesn't work then you won't stay is business very long. It boils down to economics of scale.

You stand a much better chance of getting better results from a $500 outboard pre with '$50' worth of components inside .

Unless we are talking about custom transformers and other boutique hardware components most of the bits used in even well regarded pres are not that expensive.

The transistors, IC's, resistors and caps could all be bought for a few bucks. It doesn't mean the pre will sound like a heap of shit.
But you still need a decent design and you have to build it.

The main components in a Sytek pre probably cost only a few bucks more than those in a Mackie. Does that make the Sytek crap because it doesn't contain $2000 worth of components?... AND it uses IC's!!... :eek:

Even one mid range P&G fader will cost a lot more than the components used in most pres.

And NO... I wasn't trying to be funny! :)
 
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