Umm... OK Velvet Elvis. Send me your mailing address!
I'll ummm... be sure and get right on that.
Seriously though, If anyone here hasn't used these pre's you should look into them.
Once you have the powered rack these babies are like $500 a pop for a single channel of one of the best sounding pres around.
So, you're looking at about $2500 - $2600 for 4 channels; but you can build those 4 channels over time as funds become available.
You wont be sorry if you do.
Do you have a picture of them? Are they pretty bare bones (phase, gain, etc) or do they have minimal eq as well?
I'd store your Boston up here too, except my parents own a 7-foot Steinway grand that was purchased (long story) from the New York World's Fair... and it sounds purty dern nice Just wish they'd let me take it to MY house.
Tex - The Averill's ARE API's. Brent just recaps them, and puts his face-plate on them. You have a choice (well, you USED to have a choice) between the original richenbacher tranny's or an upgraded jensen tranny.
I actually have 2 of each. The difference is very subtle. The richenbachers seem to have a ... I dunno how to explain it.. a tighter response on attack.
I've never tried the OSA's. Supposedly they're really good. It just seems that they don't hold their resale value quite as well.
At any rate, here's my mic-pre rack (what I'll show you of it anyway )
What you see on the top there is a pair of Audix 35102's
VERY Neve-ish! In fact, Audix (the console manufacturer, not the mic maker) was formed by ex-neve employees.
Those 35102's are sleepers guys! 80db of the CLEANEST gain you have ever heard! Plus, you have the parametric eq to really help shape your sound.
I'll be honest, it took me a while to learn how to get the most out of the 35102's, but once I did.... well, I aint trading them for nothing!
Oh yeah.
Almost forgot about the 550b down there in the bottom rack.
Very musical, incredibly surgical.
I need another one though to really fool around with 'em.
This is of course the ART PRO MPA Dual Microphone Preamplifer.
Yeah. Its a toob pre.
You can get a really nice sound from this unit as long as you don't drive the tubes too hard.
If you've ever heard my song December's Mist' it was done using the Pro MPA and a pair of TLM 103's.
I also used it on vocals for a client tracking a song called "Wake Up in a Dream"
The vocals were done using a TLM 103 thru the PRO MPA.
He had some kind of modeling amp, and was dead set about going DI with it. I COULD NOT talk him into miking the amp!
So we went DI into the 35102's. And he HAD to do everything "live". So there's some bleed into the vocals from his strumming.
It came out OK, but it could have been better if he would have listened.