He's right about the B1's being high output. I have a couple lying around. I have to use an inline pad on a couple of my pre's when using them on toms, etc. (high spl sources). Mic placement is primarily about getting the right tone from a recording. If you place a mic in a position and get the perfect sound (nice!) and move it away because of volume issues, you're not going to have that same tone anymore (99.9% of the time). If you can pad it (attenuate the output of the mic before the preamp) with a pad built in to the mic, do that first (unfortunately on many mics the tone changes a bit here, too with their built in pads- some mics much less than others). If the mic doesn't have a built in pad, try using an inline pad (such as the Shure variable pad). Especially with a tube pre that has an input trim and output gain (or not tune, transformer based), if your mic is maxing out the input, you won't have much headroom for trying different tonal (tube or transformer, etc.) options with the pre, example- the tube is already saturated on input so there's no real "clean" option to send to output. Hope this helps somebody. It sure helped me when I was introduced to the idea back in '23 : )
p.s. there are "variable" inline pads like the shure where you can select the attenuation (10,15,20,40 db) and "fixed" inline pads that have a set db attenuation (15db or such). You can also find some info on how to make your own online.
mckay
bounce inventive audio
