Ford Van said:
I guess what I am trying to say is that preamps are mostly an overrated piece of gear in the whole realm of things! A great source sound, a good microphone pick, putting that microphone in the right spot, and a solid monitoring chain to hear what the heck is going on will yield you good results regardless of what pre's you are using!
I both agree and disagree. Like all audio gear, higher quality preamps result in diminishing returns. For example, line up a handful of pres in quality order: SoundBlaster, old Mackie Pres (for example), modern mixer pres, modern standalone pres, high-end standalone pres.
The difference between the SB and the old Mackie pres is huge, but those pres still sound really muddy. The difference between that and the modern mixer pres is fairly significant, but nowhere near the improvement that the old Mackie pres made over the SB. Moving up to a midrange standalone pre might make a difference, but it will be smaller. Moving to a high end pre will cost a lot more, and the difference will be smaller still (unless you're buying something radically different like a tube preamp).
That's not saying that those high end pres don't improve your sound, but each step up in the food chain costs ever-increasing amounts of money compared with the previous step, and the improvement in quality gets progressively smaller.
To make matters worse, there isn't a direct correlation between price and quality unless you look at very large jumps. The difference between a
current generation $100-200 mixer with 4-8 channels and a 2-channel DMP3 is likely to be minimal, as most of the cost turns out to be sales channel loss, power supply, case, import duties from China/Korea/Singapore, etc. So little of the cost of modern gear has anything to do with the actual materials that interact with the audio signal that it renders comparisons by price almost meaningless unless the per-channel cost increases by... say a factor of 10. Soundblaster: $1.50/channel, mixer $25/channel, tube preamp: $400+ per channel, etc.
This is true in microphones as well, really. I've tried some expensive mics and some cheap mics, and sometimes the cheap mics sound dramatically better than the expensive ones on some sources. At least with the sub $1000 mics I've tried, I have seen little correlation between price and sound quality.... Some cheap mics rock, some expensive mics rock, some cheap mics suck, some expensive mics blow.
Of course, in microphones, the best thing to do is to have a wide range of mics from which to choose so that you can get the sound that best suits the source. With preamps, unless I'm going for color, I mainly want it to stay the heck out of my way. So the microphone is a much more important contributor to the sound (again, unless I intentionally want to color the sound).
IMHO, order of importance from most important to least:
1. Quality of the source itself.
2. Quality of the room you're recording in (for a distant mic).
3. Microphone/source matching.
4. Quality of the room you're recording in (for a close mic).
5. Having a preamp that doesn't suck.
6. Microphone placement.
7. Appropriate use of EQ where necessary.
8. Having a preamp that is of moderate quality.
9. Converter quality.
10. Clock rate and/or analog filter bank quality.
11. High end preamps would go here.
12. Clock signal quality.
Just my $0.02.
) and Ive been looking at some of the ART preamps, and the Delta DMP3.
