Preamp with mixer

Enchilada

Enchilada

Strange person.
Instead of buying lots of preamps, can hook up a preamp to an aux send of a mixer and run all channels through it?

Just an idea, probably won't work. Just thought I'd check
 
A mixer has preamps, what would be the point of doing this?

If you are looking for a quality boost, it won't work. Your signal will only be as good as the crappiest piece of gear in the chain.
 
Farview said:
A mixer has preamps, what would be the point of doing this?

If you are looking for a quality boost, it won't work. Your signal will only be as good as the crappiest piece of gear in the chain.
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What If I pluged mics into inserts, doesn't that bypass the mixers pres?
 
Basically, the first thing your mic needs to run through is a preamp in order to get it to the proper level for all of your other equipment. Regardless of how you do it, you pretty much need one preamp per mic.
 
Creamyapples1 said:
Again, would would the point be?
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To get the tone of a more expensive preamp across multiple channels, like when recording drums.

The more I think about it the more it sounds like a dumb idea though.
 
You'd be better off going straight into the soundcard from the pre. That's what I do with my Octane.
 
MadAudio said:
You'd be better off going straight into the soundcard from the pre. That's what I do with my Octane.
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That's easy for you to say, you can afford a preamp with 8 chennels. I cannot.
I think I'd be better off investing in a better comp & sticking with my behringer mixer for pres, they've served me well so far. I actually got some compliments for the tone of vocals in this thread:
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=181236

Those songs we're recorded using a behringer UB802 mixer as a preamp. The tone is good to my ears and I suppose that's all that really matters
 
Most of the 'magic' of good mic preamps is how the preamp reacts to the mics electronics. If you put something in between the mic and the preamp, you have just lost that, while adding noise, hum, etc... The other problem is that you would end up with one track of drums. (by summing them all through one preamp)

Your board couldn't possibly be that bad sounding. If you aren't paying at least $300/channel for a preamp, it won't be that much better than the preamps in a very cheap board.
 
Farview said:
If you aren't paying at least $300/channel for a preamp, it won't be that much better than the preamps in a very cheap board.
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So are you saying I'm better off keeping my behringer mixer? I actually don't mind the sound I'm getting at the moment. If you get time could you have a listen to the recordings I did in the link above and tell me if you think I'd be better off getting a DMP3 or sticking with my mixer
 
While the dmp3 maybe sounds a little more pleasing to some people, you would still have a problem....not enough inputs.

If you don't mind the sound you are getting now, wait untill you can make a significant upgrade. You can waste a lot of money upgrading from low level gear to upper lower level gear then to mid grade gear, then upper midgrade gear, then.......

I'm sure you have bigger fish to fry.
 
Farview said:
If you don't mind the sound you are getting now, wait untill you can make a significant upgrade.
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I think that's the best advice I've ever been given on this forum. At the moment I don't mind the sound of the Berry pres, so I'll keep using them until I can some high quality gear. :)
 
Enchilada said:
I think that's the best advice I've ever been given on this forum. At the moment I don't mind the sound of the Berry pres, so I'll keep using them until I can some high quality gear. :)
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Berry pres are very usable, regardless of all of the naysaying. I used a Berry board for about 6 months, recently upgraded to a Yamaha MG16/4 and I won't look back. For not much more than the Berry board, the Yamaha is leaps and bounds better imo, but that's just me. If it gets any better, and I know it does, I can't wait! :D
 
Wow, just read this re-thread. This question now sounds ridiculous to me. It's amazing how much you can learn in 5 years!
 
There's a fundamental thing that needs to be understood here....the difference between microphone level and line level.

The signal coming from a microphone is incredibly low--typically around -50dBu. If this was expressed in voltage terms, it's something like 1/20,000th the level used inside a mixer or whatever.

The job of the pre amp is the amplify this signal up to "line level" which is the level used inside mixers, outboard rack gear, CD players, etc. etc.

When you plug a microphone into your mixer, the very first thing it hits is the mixer's version of the pre-amp and the signal is raised to line level. The inserts come after the pre-amp because, when you feed the signal out of the mixer to whatever outboard you want, it needs to be at line level--and the return is at line level too.

So, forget feeding several auxes to a pre-amp--the auxes are after the mixer pre-amp so you'd hugely overload a mic pre if you fed a line level aux into it.

Forget feeding an insert out to a mic pre-amp. Again, it's after the mixer pre and would overload badly.

So...if you want external pre-amps, you have to have one per mic and feed into the line level sockets on the mixer--or, even better, as somebody suggested, drop the mixer entirely and just feed the pre-amp to your interface.

However, if you're basically happy with your sound, why worry about an external pre-amp at all? As I posted yesterday, your microphone and your room acoustics make a far bigger difference than a boutique pre-amp. Unless you have an excellent microphone and spend a LOT of money on the pre-amp, you're just wasting your cash.

Edited to Add: I just noticed the original date and the update just above...I was responding to the first page of posts. Ah well...maybe this is useful to somebody searching threads!
Bob
 
I didn't listen but trust me....you will KNOW when it is time to upgrade. If you can't hear the difference then it isn't time. Remember, your mix/recording are only going to be as good as the weakest piece of gear in your chain. Unfortunately, a lot of the time as Homerecordist we have a hard time admitting that "weak piece of gear" is ourselves. That isn't aimed directly at you, I am just saying....don't go buying up "x" piece of gear because you think it is going to make your mix sound 1000 times better. That RARELY is the case. A good engineer can work magic out of some very basic gear. I have heard/seen this many times before. Your mileage may vary but that has been my experience.


Crap......just saw the date on this LOL
 
Enchilada said:
To get the tone of a more expensive preamp across multiple channels, like when recording drums.

The more I think about it the more it sounds like a dumb idea though.
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You need to study up on basic signal flow. You can't send multiple mics through one mic preamp.
 
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