Stupid question regarding digital recording with a tube mic pre.

  • Thread starter Thread starter pinkphiloyd
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pinkphiloyd

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I was kicking around the idea of picking up an old tube mic pre just to play around with, and it dawned on me that I'm really not sure how I would use it in the digital realm. My set up is simple: an Apogee One into a Macbook Pro running Garageband. I don't do anything really fancy. So would I just run the tube pre into the Apogee? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
 
From Sweetwater:
Single channel input using 1 of the following 3 options: Internal condenser microphone, Balanced XLR microphone preamp input with +10 to 63dB of gain, Unbalanced 1/4" high-impedance instrument input, 0 to 45dB of gain
You need a line in usually to connect the line out of the mic pre to the line in of the Apogee (which it does not have).
 
pinkphiloyd said:
Eh. Sounds like a big pain for just an experiment.
Click to expand...

Nah, just buy a really cheap passive guitar DI box. The valve pre will hit it pretty hard but that might even add to some of the "attitude" you are looking for.

Alternatively, if you want a really clean feed to the apogee buy or build a line level 20dB balanced attenuator.

Dave.
 
FYI..Nearest common preferred values..
4k7 each input leg, 680R shunt. 180R in each output leg will give about 20dB of attenuation. Cannot be or need to be precise because we don't know the exact source and load Zs.

Dave.
 
Morning Mark.
Both those attenuators are a bit low on input impedance. The transformer jobbie is not too bad at 1k but I would still like a 10k load on a line output. Too low a load might cause distortion of an unwanted kind.

Still! Both are cheap enough to try and can do no harm.

Dave.
 
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