
distortedrumble
all up in yo grill!
so i guess i should hold out until great river, apogee, orion and the rest of the highend stuff to take their name off of it and sell it as a generic mixer that i can pick up at walmart! genius! lol.
IMO, you should get a M-Audio DMP3 now and start recording... later after you've gained a little more experience you'll have a better idea what more you want/need.billmcdonald said:Ive heard good and bad things about the cheaper preamps. I am not super picky, but I cant have things distorting and stuff. Most of the stuff I will be recording is metal. Is it absolutely necessary to have a preamp? If so, what should I get? Im on a budget (arent we all) and Ive been looking at some of the ART preamps, and the Delta DMP3.
Also, would a "good" solid state preamp be better than a cheap "starved plate" tube preamp?
Do you guys think it would be worth it just to go without a preamp for a while and save up for something in the 6-800 dollar price range?
Any help/advice is appreciated.![]()
TomBo777 said:Pre Amps are one of the most over rated pieces of gear...The Preamp is the holy grail on the recording message boards.............BS.......You will get great results with a mid priced pre amp. Save the big bucks for your monitors. There you will hear whats right or wrong with your gear or music.
The Pre Amps on the SoundCraft Folio are nice, even the Mackies and the Art stuff is not bad for those on a lower budget. You will sell your CDs if your music is good and most people will not know the difference. Hell most people cannot tell synth horns from real ones and most people don't listen to a CD as an only activity either in an anacholic chamber....more likely a noisy car or on a pocket player though $10 earphones.
For around $400 a channel you can get a good enough pre amp to avoid embarrasement if thats your worry. Look I met a guy in Branson who has a studio and he has (gasp) Behringer gear in his rack. YEp !
Heres the URL. http://www.nothm.com/equipframe.htm
Look at his equiptment and client list. Its not about the gear as much as the ear. Let the Elitists fight over $2000 pre amps. You dont need to get into that world. Those guys use gear in place of ears to attract clients and get the big wow from other engineers. Many clients just want a good clean recording and the gear availabel today to the masses is plenty good enough for that. The thousands of high dollar gear studios going out of busines is a testament to that. Think of it this way....A guy wears a Rolex watch for one reason...not becasue it keeps better time than a Timex..or has better modern technology...nope.......Peole wear those thingsto Impress.......That world exists everywhere and audio does not get a pass...People love to say they have a certain piece of gear only few would or could buy....There are diminishing returns in the audio world the more you spend. After all the end users are ripping your $2000 pre Amped recording into 128bit MP3s!!!!
Gary has some nice gear. But also some people on these boards would call garbage. He displays his "garbage" proudly and he is still in business while other "floating Modern Pro Tools studios with all the latest bells and whistles starve......Why? Becasue quality clients buy ears....not gear.
I use a Joe Meek VCQ1 and also have a couple ART MP'a and an ART VLA. I have been a gear whore for 25 years and of all the CDs I have produced and sold I never got a CD back becaue it did not technically sound quite right or I used a terrible pre amp lol .........content is another thing..LOL
I wish I had the quality/price ratio today you younger guys have....I have spent less time trying to get decent equiptment and noise from my studio and more time making music.............Guys on this board are making nice recordings with Octiva Mics and ART MP 's Check out the mic forum.
TomBo777 said:You think a Bentley is worth $100,000 more than a Chrysler? I dont.
YOu think a stainless steel Rolex is worth $5970 more than TIMEX? Not me.
You think a little man on a Polo Horse makes a T shirt worth $53? Not I.
TomBo777 said:Many here, I am assuming have Home Studios and record their own music and maybe some friends. There is no need for the Big buck gear to do that. No one will know the difference.....its unfortunate for those who did spend a small fortune on Elite gear but its true.
TomBo777 said:In the end its music on a CD that untrained and abused ears will listen to and either like the music or not regardless of what preamp was used on the lead vocalist. I would bet even A/B ing the same track they could not tell the difference......nor will it make a sad song better.
TomBo777 said:The cost of a product in my world has no real bearing on its quality...especially in such a subjective field as audio.........
I don't buy things based on what they cost. I do pass on buying things based on cost though. I do not blindly assume higher prices means better.
I need real proof of that...and then.. how much better.
You think a Bentley is worth $100,000 more than a Chrysler? I dont.
YOu think a stainless steel Rolex is worth $5970 more than TIMEX? Not me.
You think a little man on a Polo Horse makes a T shirt worth $53? Not I.
I do not believe that $3000+ Requisite Preamp is 5 times better then my VCQ1 aurally. But thats just me. .
Many here, I am assuming have Home Studios and record their own music and maybe some friends. There is no need for the Big buck gear to do that. No one will know the difference.....its unfortunate for those who did spend a small fortune on Elite gear but its true.
In the end its music on a CD that untrained and abused ears will listen to and either like the music or not regardless of what preamp was used on the lead vocalist. I would bet even A/B ing the same track they could not tell the difference......nor will it make a sad song better.
as compared to what?While the general public may not be able to speak in technical terms about why something sounds better than something else, they certainly can *perceive* the differences as well as anybody. Of course they won't be able to tell you what preamp was used, or how much it cost. But if great care was taken with the recording, if quality gear was used well throughout, they will be able to hear the difference with that.
TomBo777 said:The way I decided on my Joe Meek VCQ1 was a true A/B. I was all caught up in pre amp and the costs. My ART MP was supposed to be junk so I went shopping and bought the Meek and a $2000 Avalon from GC. I made the same recording using both. mixed them down and burned a CD. I shuffled them and played them in various places...I let friends hear them and although there was a differance between them it was just that "a difference" not one better than the other. Some prefered one over the other. And this was actually listening to the song....My question had to be "was is the Avalon 4X as good since it cost 4X as much?"......My conclusion was no, not 4X better by any stretch. on paper maybe who knows. And thats how I buy all my gear.
TomBo777 said:Maybe I'll buy a Grace to A/B with it for fun........nah.
TomBo777 said:The point is you can't believe anybody. you have to buy the gear and A/B it. You will come to your own conclusions.
SonicAlbert said:This is good stuff cavedog. I agree with your categorizations, but there are other factors.
What if the hobbiest really wants to sound better, for example? If someone has $600-800 to spend on a preamp, is that better preamp a waste of their money? I really don't think so.
It is wonderful to read posts from people that want to sound as good as they can and are willing to spend more of their hard earned money to do so. That to me means that they are becoming educated in this stuff. That maybe some of the advice that I and others are spreading about "quality geaer matters" is taking root. And that they are listening to their ears and something is telling them it can be better.
It seems a little callous to say that if you ask a question here at homerecording then better gear won't help your sound. The whole point of places like this is to educate oneself and to find help and advice for studio related issues. And I think that asking a question and taking that advice *will* possibly help ones sound. At the very least, when the higher quality preamp is taken out of its box, plugged and heard for the first time, it may provide an epiphany of sorts, where the advice gets connected to the ears.
I know what happened the first time I spent more money than I wanted to on a truly high quality piece of gear. It was truly eye-opening, and I was never able to turn back from that, either. There are still old message board posts from me in my "prosumer" gear days. Posts where I passionately argued how my Roland blah-blah was just as good as the esoteric and expensive super blah-blah. Now that I've used, heard, and owned some pretty high end gear, I know what I was missing before. And as cavedog says, you really don't know what you are missing until you *hear* what you are missing.
An example: I needed to track my Steinway last year for a film score. Using Shure KSM32 mics, I started out going through my TASCAM DM-24 preamps. Good, clean, perfectly usable. i had a pair of Presonus TubePRE's at that time that I was reviewing for SonicState. So I recorded some test tracks through them as well. The same: good, clean usable tracks. Then I hooked up my Grace 201 and did some test tracks there as well. HUGE. Big gigantic *gorgeous* sounding piano tracks. Night and day, no comparison to the budget preamps. The point is, the budget preamp tracks sounded fine until I heard the Grace 201 preamp tracks. Then that really put the others in their place.
The thing about this stuff is you need to hear it in your own setting, on your own voice, on your own instrument. That's what makes comparisons hard.
But I will have to say that mic preamps are one of those things where money does buy quality. At $800-1,000 per channel and up you *are* going to get a stellar preamp. We are just talking flavors at that point.
My concept of what I want can be had with what I have....So your friends pick out your studio gear. Don't you buy it based on what YOU hear, on what YOU want? What about YOUR musical vision? Don't you have a concept of how you want your music to sound and then buy gear that helps you achieve that?