Pre's...are they magic?

[Fletcher]

Believe it or not, you'll know all on your own when you're ready to "upgrade" your gear. When you can sit there and ring out every last ounce of tone from your present rig, make good clear, damn near where you want them recordings with the tools at your disposal, then and only then would I recommend you look into improving your toolset.

I'm an amatuer mechanic. I have a good set of open end wrenches, a good set of box wrenches, and a pretty comprehensive set of socket wrenches. I have absolutely no business even thinking about "air powered" tools. They'll make things go a whole lot easier. From time to time I go down to my friends shop [a serious mechanic!] and use his, but it's abso-fuckin-lutely ridiculous for me to even consider the investment until such time as I can no longer perform the level of work I would like to perform with the tools at my immediate disposal.

This parallel work for you at all?

 

[chadsxe]

Today was the first time I ever noticed a true difference between pres and they are budget ones at that. I was testing my signal paths to make sure I had every thing hooked up correctly. My genius test consisted of me hooking my mic up through my new Mackie vlz board and saying a few words then moving over to my DMP3 and doing the same thing. I played them back to compare and was pretty shocked to notice a big difference between the two. The DMP3 was clear quit and sterile while the vlz pres were fuller (I still don't know the proper terms to describe sounds ) Anyways it made me happy to know that I was able to notice such a small thing.

 

[Big Kenny]

Fletch,
That rings very true. I got a screwdriver and a hammer and until I can drive a nail in straight, I'm puttin' my gas on hold. (With the possible exception of a ribbon)

 

[MadMax]

Good one Fletcher. I keep trying to draw parallels to my guitar collection and then realize that I've been playing guitar professionally for 30+ years and recording "when I can" for maybe 5.

 

[OneArmedScissor]

In most cases, a home recordist would be well served to upgrade the instruments / amps / drums etc. that they are recording before something like preamps. Even then, I would reach for better mics before I upgraded my preamps.

No kidding. People overlook the instruments and equipment related to them WAY too much. I know for sure that tons of people come here asking questions about how they can improve the sound they get with their $1,000+ recording setup and $200 amp all the time. Thats working backwards in the gear department if you ask me.

There are also all sorts of kinds of mics, and they sound completely different. A mic that is absolutely killer on one thing could outright suck on something else. A preamp isn't too likely to be that way. When you really get down to it, preamps are pretty much just preamps, whether they are tube or SS. If you use basically any one preamp to track everything, but a lot of different mics, the end result will surely come out better than it would have if you used lots of preamps and maybe just a very small number of mics (or even just one ). That's a bit of a blanket statement, but I think the idea makes sense hehe.

 

[Jeppo]

Yes it does make sense. Mics will make a bigger difference than preamps, but there's a whole lot of other stuff you can do that doesn't cost money - just time. A couple of years ago I got sucked into the whole gearlust thing thinking that I could become a better engineer by throwing more money at the problem.

When I made a decision to stop buying new toys & focus on the ones I still had, my recordings got better. More to the point, I actually started to appreciate and enjoy the gear I had rather than get frustrated with it.