Preamp to go with studio poweramp and monitors

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cliff K
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Cliff K

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I'm about to put a monitor system together for my little home studio. What's good out there for around $200, new or used?
Thanks,
Cliff
 
Sorry, what? You want a preamp for your monitor system....? I'm not sure what that is. Do you mean a headphone amp?
 
Hmmmm....maybe I'm more clueless than I thought :confused: . I've got an old Tascam M308B mixer that I've been using with headphones up to now. I want to get some small monitors to listen through for mixing. Don't I need a preamp to go between the mixer and the power amp? I feel like an idiot for asking this...please forgive me, I've never put a monitor system together.
Thanks
 
Cliff K said:
I want to get some small monitors to listen through for mixing. Don't I need a preamp to go between the mixer and the power amp?
Click to expand...

If you have passive monitors, you need an amplifier to give them power.

The other option is to buy a pair of powered monitors that have their amplifiers built in. The advantage is that the amplifier is matched to the speaker with the right amount of power, and it's one less piece of gear to hook up.

Check out the forum here called "other equipment and reviews". There is a lot of information and opinions about which monitors are good to own. Also www.studiocovers.com has a lot of info. at the "Monitors" section.
 
Alright then....sorry for the stupid question! Thanks for the tip on the powered monitors.

Cliff
 
I think Cliff may have been conversing with an audiophile person. They seem to be hung up on having some voodoo/snake-oil preamp unit between the playback source and the poweramp. What this thingy does I do not know! Us recording folks like to keep our chain as simple as possible, so we go playback source->power amp->speakers (or source->active speakers)

<rant>
I have a friend who is an audiophile and I always have to bite my tongue when he extols the virtues of his "all tubes" preamp when he listens to his music. If the music is so good, why do you have to muck it up with more processing (purity baby!)

</rant>
 
Cliff,

You need something to control the volume of your speakers. A hifi preamp is designed to be a quality volume control. Most people here (like me) use a budget mixer like behringer or mackie as a volume control. Unfortunately budget mixers are not as transparent as most hifi preamps. As you can imagine a budget mixer is filled with cheap pots, opamps and capacitors. A hifi pre (even a budget one) should sound better than a budget mixer because you are paying for only one (semi) decent pot and associated components.

Many mastering engineers build their own passive preamps to use as high quality volume controls.
 
alfalfa said:
Cliff,

You need something to control the volume of your speakers. A hifi preamp is designed to be a quality volume control. Most people here (like me) use a budget mixer like behringer or mackie as a volume control. Unfortunately budget mixers are not as transparent as most hifi preamps. As you can imagine a budget mixer is filled with cheap pots, opamps and capacitors. A hifi pre (even a budget one) should sound better than a budget mixer because you are paying for only one (semi) decent pot and associated components.

Many mastering engineers build their own passive preamps to use as high quality volume controls.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, folks. I'm learning more and more hanging around this place. My mixer is an old Tascam M308B.....it has stereo buss faders, and it has a "PHONES" pot that controls the volume of the headphones (what I'm currently using, and all I've ever used with this mixer), and it has a "MONITOR" pot just below the "PHONES" pot. I'm assuming that the "MONITOR" pot will control the volume going to the power amp, and I don't know if there is any way to bypass the mixer's monitor volume control and use a better sounding hifi preamp, as you mention.......how would you bypass the mixer's monitor volume to use a hifi preamp?

Thanks,
Cliff
 
I would go straight from your soundcard or DAC to the hifi preamp, bypassing the mixer.
 
Yes, the line preamp is what you're looking for. Not only will it allow you to control volume, but also switch sources, and sometimes they have phono preamps built in which can be handy.

Really it's not much of an "amplification" because in reality it's almost just attenuating an incoming line signal, but it is going to be an active device. I'm no electronics guru so somebody else would have to theorize about that stuff.

Alternatively, you could just use a small mixer and achieve the same result more or less. Many people are already using mixers which is why they look at you with that "huh?" expression. :)

No, you can't just take a line out from your soundcard or DAC into your power amp or things are going to be really freakin loud! Some people just use the digital mixer for their soundcard or whatever digital device, but that's not as nice a solution IMHO as an analog circuit.

This is one area where the computer/digital companies have really overlooked. Lots of us have absolutely no use for a mixer, thus we need something before our power amps.

Slackmaster 2000
 
alfalfa said:
I would go straight from your soundcard or DAC to the hifi preamp, bypassing the mixer.
Click to expand...

Hey alfalfa,
Okay, I see, it's better to use a clean preamp/volume control, rather than a mixer for a volume control, to go from the computer to the amp. I'm not using a computer; I've got a 1/4" Fostex 8-trk analog tape machine going to my mixer. I've somehow accumulated early 80's analog gear to record with, but it's cool for now :) .Hopefully I'll have a computer for recording soon.....it's on my list, somewhere after a monitor system. I actually like the way the Fostex machine sounds, but I think a computer and good sound card and software will make things easier.

Thanks,
Cliff
 
Any info that anyone has on building a fader type circuit like that mentioned above would be much appreciated. We've had this discussion here to no avail in the past. Certainly just tossing a resister in the signal might "work" but it wouldn't be good. What would it take?

Slackmaster 2000
 
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