Dude!!!!
I halfway think you were messing with us with your first go! This one is great!!! Sorry I missed your question from yesterday. It does seem a little wierd to have a drive control on a pre, and I don't have any experience with it. However, I do know what the designers are trying to give you, and I think it's a good idea. As a guitar player, I'm very familiar with driving a tube, which is what the drive control is doing. I don't know what the exact ciruit in your pre is but they're all kind of similar. The drive control regulates how strong the input signal is as it goes into the tube stage. The tube amplifies it, and then the gain control lets you turn the output down to whatever final level you want. The key concept (and the main point of using a tube) is that the tube stage can only go so loud before it hits its 'max'. So when the input signal gets to the point that the amplified output signal is at max, the output will just stay at that max level, even as the input continues to go up. This will happen on each cycle of the waveform. Picture an input waveform that might look like a sine wave. The tube will amplify it so the peak to peak gets larger, but when it hits its max, those peaks will get flattened on top. This same effect applies to every amplier or preamplifier in the world, and we call this flattening of the peaks 'clipping'. (If you know all of this, feel free to hit the scroll down button
). In general, clipping is a bad thing. An amplifier, in general, is supposed to give you a louder version of the input at the output. If all the peaks are 'clipped' off, clearly that's not what we're getting. What we're getting is a distorted version of the input. With transistor based amplifiers, as the signal increases the amplifier tends to operate as if nothing is wrong almost right up to the max and then the waveform 'suddenly' flattens out. This sounds really bad. The thing that makes tubes sound 'good', on the other hand, is that as the output approaches the max on each cycle of the waveform, it starts sort of "slowing down" waaaay ahead of time, so that it flattens out very smoothly. Unlike the sudden flattening, this smooth flattening often sounds 'good'. For guitars, it sounds REALLY good, even better than the undistorted signal would. I have no experience with tube pre's, but supposedly the same is true with a microphone signal. That's why tube pre's exist. The drive control lets you regulate how far into this smoothly flattened out region the amp operates. With the drive set low, the input signal is low enough that even after being amplified by the tube, it doesn't reach the max, so there is virtually no distortion. Turn the drive up and at first the tops of the peaks in the waveform will just start to get rounded. This is where it should sound best with a microphone, although as I've already said, I have no personal experience with this. With a guitar, depending on what kind of sound your looking for it can sound good all the way to full drive. The gain and drive controls work together, because as the drive is turned up, of course, the output gets louder and louder. For reasons that are hard to explain, even when the peaks are flattened, as you turn the drive up and they get more flattened, the output will get louder (and more distorted, of course). You use the gain knob to turn it back to the level you want - peaks just below 0dB.
As for which inputs/outputs to use, I agree with Miroslav that you are doing it right. Balanced output from the pre to the mic input on the interface. You definitely are kind of running a preamp into a preamp, but with the sensitivity control, you can match the levels. You just turn the sensitivity down so that the interface itself doesn't have anygain since your pre has already given you a standard level signal. You might want to experiment with the mic straight into the interface. Your interface is designed to handle a mic level signal. You will just have to crank the sensitivity up so that its own internal preamp provides the needed gain to bring up the microphones signal. Try it both ways and you can judge for yourself whether the tube is improving the sound.
Anyway, sorry to write such a long post. You're latest tracks sound great, so clearly you've figured out how to work your gear already. Keep on playing and keep on recording!
J
the recording isnt better but the sax sound better... I think that happens because I didnt use the preamp (cannot power it on in the car)... LOL