RightOn, thanks for your comments. I apologise to the community as a whole if I've bothered you with this thread. I'm very new to this, and since I'll be undergoing surgery on July 9th, I'd like to have a lot of my setup in place so I can work on some tracking during the time that I'll be stuck at home. Hence, dispite my research outside this website, I'm trying to gain the knowledge of the experts on this board before making any uneducated decisions.
As for your comments, my thinking was this:
1. Since not all preamps are rack-mount, especially the less expensive kinds, which often tend to be free-standing, I wasn't confident that posting this in the "Rack" forum would have been appropriate, and, ironically, wanted to avoid people telling me that I was posting this in the wrong place.
2. "Sorry, the server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later." - I'm on a somewhat slow connection, and when the search function failed me a few times over the course of a half-hour stretch, I browsed the forums looking for such a thread. Seeing nothing recent off-hand, I felt that the post would be acceptable.
So, again, my apologies. I guess I can't delete the entire thread, so all I ask is that you ignore it.